Instability
by Steelfeathers
Summary: Post-ROTF. On board the air craft carrier headed back to Diego Garcia, Sam has a slight mental breakdown.
1. Wanderings

The first freak-out session came a few days later. Who knew a broom closet would be the perfect setting to break down in a psychotic fit?

What survivors there were-- including, to his own amazement, Sam himself-- had been packed up aboard the air craft carrier and were currently en route to Diego Garcia via the Red Sea, making the week long journey back to the Indian island. The Autobots-- the battered, the torn, and the recently resurrected-- had all been granted ample steerage space among the cargo housed below deck. It was the only place large enough for them to move around in. There was always the deck, of course, but after the first night the brass skittishly nibbled their fingernails and requested (ordered) that they remain out of sight and away from the danger of being spotted by the very satellites that had previously afforded the Decepticons all the information they could ever want. Ever pragmatic, the Autobots had agreed.

The human left-overs were boxed into pre-existing quarters after being thoroughly poked and prodded and bandaged. Most were soldiers, and as such had elected to bunk with others of their species. The few civilians sprinkled among them (including a reluctantly rescued Galloway) received the luxury of their own private rooms. Though 'rooms' might have been too generous a term.

Sam could pace five steps from the door to the bed, which occupied the back wall, and three steps across the width. There was a tea cup metal sink and a mirror, but no toilet, and the bed itself could have passed for a slab of concrete. His parents, to his mingled relief and horror, occupied the room directly beside him. He had tried and failed to force up something approaching a laugh when he found out that they would be sharing bunk beds. The quartermaster had given him an odd look, to which he shrugged in a roundabout way and studied the walls. Not his brightest idea. There were no windows; Starscream could attack at any moment and he would never see it coming. Not that it would make much of a difference if he could-- the Autobots' powerful scanners would detect the vicious seeker long before human eyes could pick out a spot on the horizon. But nevertheless, he hated the feeling of being blind to any possible threats lurking around them. It gave him the feeling of being trapped in a metal box, slowly sinking...

Most of the time, he was left to his own devices. His parents smothered him for a day or two; at first they merely held him with a quiet, almost reverent thankfulness that was more unsettling than screaming fits or violent sobs. Although those came, as well, and once they were relatively sure that he was alive and solid enough not to vanish into a puff of air at the slightest jostle they started verbally letting loose with both guns. He humored them in silence, simply drinking them in with his eyes in a way that unnerved them both. They couldn't understand that he would take the shouting and hair pulling and empty (and not-so-empty) threats over silence and flowers and newly carved headstones. But at long last they finally calmed down a little, at least enough to let him sleep the entire night in his own bed without being awakened by a tousled head poking around his door at three am, just to be sure that he hadn't splattered into a pool of human goo while they weren't looking.

While in some ways it was a relief to be rid of the constant attention, the unwavering scrutiny, in other ways he longed for some minor disaster or other to wreak a little chaos. Having too much time alone with his thoughts was a Very Bad Thing. They kept showing him things; Blood. Splattered gray globs of brain. Severed limbs. And things the shrinks never even considered to spout off about; Bumblebee--Ratchet--Optimus--Ironhide--Bumblebee--Bee--Bee--Bee struggling, dying, parts torn away and falling off, crawling, crawling, from the laughing, twisting shadows looming above, electric wails of fear, screaming--

No, the resident shrink they had sent him to never even considered something like that. They didn't know, and he had no plans to tell them, that the whole time he was running across that desert he was less afraid for himself than he was for his powerful (fragile) friends. Especially Bee.

But for being such a large, complexly operated ship, there was distressingly little for a civilian without a college degree to do. And so his waking nightmares began to creep from the cracks in the walls.

The day of the first incident began normally enough. Well, as normal as could reasonably be expected when your temporary home was an air craft carrier and your best friends were thirty foot tall alien robots that had just finished beating the shit out of another group of alien robots to try to stop the sun from being destroyed. So yeah. Normal.

He woke abruptly from yet another turbulent dream, feeling exhausted. That was the way of it now; nights so full of dreams that he scarcely seemed to sleep at all, and not even after spending ten hours unconscious did he feel well rested. He only felt wired. ...He he. Wired.

To his dismay, his watch read 5:13am. Almost too early to venture to the galley for breakfast, yet far too late to roll over and hope for a few more hours of darkness. The numbers glared back at him, alien red, staining his sheets and arms in a bloody glow. Stolid. Implacable. Accusing.

The watch itself was not his, but rather a 'gift' from a worshipfully grateful government scrambling to cover its ass. The clothes crumpled in piles on the floor were not his either, but he would rather wear the starchy, impersonal garments than the rags he had worn when he was dragged from the desert. Once was enough to teach the hazards of keeping groty D-day gear around-- you never knew when a creepy alien artifact was going to tumble out the pockets and totally screw up your day.

Deciding he would rather face being the first one in line for bacon and eggs than another hour or so of staring at the ceiling, Sam rolled out of bed and set off on a hunt for a reasonably non-smelly pair of pants. Brown slacks. Belt. Plain white t-shirt. A bomber style jacket, a throwback to the eighties when apparently looking like a dork had been fashionable.

He paused at the door and retraced his steps to the small desk rammed into one corner of the room. In order to facilitate interactions with the literally hundreds (thousands?) of people needed to staff something the size of an air craft carrier, everyone accompanying them from the Egyptian desert had been presented with a security clearance card. Though it provided no amount of clearance whatsoever, it did prevent him from being tossed over the side on suspicion of being a stoleaway/spy. And it allowed him to get as much food as he wished, no questions asked.

He scooped the credit card-sized badge off the desk and stuffed it down one pocket. No need to advertise that he didn't belong.

Despite it being an ungodly hour of the morning, the halls were far from deserted as he moseyed off to find some food. Some of those he passed recognized him and waved-- he pasted on a smile in return, hoping to ward off those dreaded repetitions of 'are you okay?'. No, he wasn't okay. Okay described the opposite of whatever he was. But of course, he couldn't simply come out and say that. So he smiled and nodded and danced to whatever tune they played for him, praying that the next person to come around the corner would be a complete stranger he could ignore without seeming rude.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to bang on the walls (walls closing in so tight). He wanted to jump up and down and throw a tantrum and pull his hair out and bite his hands until they bled. How could they act so normal? There were things out there that wanted to KILL them, kill them ALL and had nearly done the job TWICE! How could life go on as though nothing had happened when mere days before the entire human race had nearly been wiped out? They nodded like puppets and smiled like dolls and only Sam could see their strings, so many strings pulling them through life and into death, pulling them helplessly into death, and he knew they would keep smiling and nodding even if blood began to pour down their faces because that's the way the puppet master pulled their strings, smiling and nodding--

He blinked. He found himself outside the mess hall, simply standing there contemplating a blank wall. Enticing, mouth watering smells drifted from the doorway, but suddenly he wasn't the least bit hungry. Need— nameless, festering need—began to prickle beneath his skin.

Abruptly he turned away and started down another corridor, not knowing where he was going but knowing he needed to get there. He descended deeper and deeper into the ship, down stairwells and around corners, following the siren song of restless, aching need. Only when he found himself staring down the hallway to the cargo hold did he realize what he had been searching for.

Two guards stood sentry outside the door. In another time, another life, the guns they held at the ready would have seemed impressive, and maybe more than a little intimidating. Now they just seemed pathetic. He had been shot at with guns larger than their whole bodies. Their G.I. Joe replicas just seemed silly in comparison.

Not in the mood for arguing with the pair of grunts (trembling fear that he might start screaming and never stop if he opened his mouth) he flashed his security credit card thingy and continued striding towards the door without pause. Just let them try to stop him. Just let them.

Luckily they seemed to have been forewarned that he might come to visit and let him pass without a fuss.

He didn't know what he expected to find on the other side. A bunch of robots lazying around, sitting on crates and gossiping in that dial-tone language of theirs? A giant alien robot orgy? (A slightly hysterical giggle).

Instead he discovered a scene reminiscent of the infamous Trashing Of The Backyard night; a veritable truck stop. He hesitated in the doorway, wondering if he was interrupting their recharge cycle or something. Did robots dream of electric sheep?

Of course it had been stupid to think they might be waiting for him. They had just emerged from the figurative pit of hell and deserved a few days to sleep it off without being bothered, not to mention the fact they had no way of knowing that he was coming at that exact moment to see them, to assure himself that they were, in fact, all in one piece. Just glimpsing the familiar, if a bit worn and dirty, shapes eased the coiling monster in his chest that had tried to choke him on the entire walk (sprint) down to the cargo hold.

He didn't want to leave. He wanted to continue to bask in their calm presence, even if they were not aware of him. It had been so close, so close. A miracle, really, that they weren't hauling at least one giant hunk of scrap metal. His eyes were drawn to the imposing presence of Optimus Prime who managed, even when in truck form, to radiate an aura of power and authority (and kindness, sadness...). He winced at the visible damage to the exoskeleton, sending up another thankful prayer for the shining moment when the alien leader had coughed back to life on the desert floor, resurrecting hope and light with him. He would still have to live with being a murderer, but somehow the knowledge of his crimes hurt less now.

Natural shyness had him withdrawing into the doorway. They were his friends, yes, but they were also nearly immortal aliens with unimaginable power and intelligence. They could smash through buildings like they were cardboard boxes and pull up hundred-year-old oak trees to use as clubs. Their day dreams could probably put Einstein to shame. Heck, even Bumblebee, the youngest of the group, made the pyramids seem like shiny new toys!

They certainly didn't need a twitchy, all-around-average human breathing down their necks.

He turned to go.

"Sam."

The familiar, gentle voice stopped him in his tracks. He turned slowly to face the heavily scratched Camaro.

"Hey, Bee," he answered softly.


	2. Misunderstanding

Bumblebee. A tiny yellow insect. A talented alien scout sent to earth to hunt down the key to saving his (its?) entire race.

After having recovered from the shock of watching his dumpy old car split apart and reform into a towering robot, after coming down off the adrenaline high of witnessing said car-turned-robot slug it out with a black demon masquerading as a police car, he had actually found the alien known as Bumblebee to be quite friendly. Almost harmless, in a way. He played snippets of songs over his radio, did an endearing little dance and clapped expressively. It had almost been like interacting with a child-- a happy, bouncy, curious little child.

Boy, had his first impression ever been wrong.

The autobots-- and, by extension, cybertronians in general-- were adept mimics. Chameleons. With four years of experience skimming the periphery of human society under his belt, Bumblebee had proven more than able to adopt the ideal persona to set a skittish pair of humans at ease. Not that he had immediately turned around and skewered them alive to dissect their brains or anything, but by bits and pieces Sam had come to realize that the Bumblebee he interacted with day to day was but an act, a character he slipped into the way he would slip on his battle mask. Play pop songs at full volume. Blow raspberry sound bytes. Bounce on his tires and twiddle the steering wheel playfully. Squirt water to imitate tears. All (or almost all) were actions carefully executed to elicit a desired response.

At first Sam had laughed and played along, thinking he had found the coolest co-conspirator ever in the form of an alien robot. After all, what teenage boy didn't dream of befriending an alien and using the super-awesome powers of said alien to prank his friends and take revenge on his enemies? There was also the awe inspiring (maniacal giggle inspiring) factor of even knowing an alien to begin with.

But then reality had come crashing down around their ears, and the goofy (harmless) yellow car changed from best friend to ruthless warrior as easily as flipping a light switch. The battle mask came down; innocent, open features vanished beneath hard, cruel lines, and the playful Bee changed into a deadly hornet. The same hand that patted his back and mussed up his hair burst apart, clicked, whirled, became a cannon that, with a searing blast of turquoise light, blew molten holes in the sides of buildings and other robots.

Not that he wasn't worshipfully grateful for the alien's fire power. Quite the opposite, in fact. Plunging back into battle with the bottom half of his legs missing (metal struts poking out like exposed bone) the way he had probably saved many lives, including those of Sam and Mikaela. But it was as if the buddy you hung out with at school had suddenly taken a hatchet to a group of muggers harassing you in the parking lot-- terrifying, and very disturbing. The sheer intensity with which the Bouncing Baby Bumblebee had gazed at him after the battle, body horrendously scarred and wounded, blue optics gleaming with an almost feverish passion, and quietly, solemnly, requested to continue his mission of guardianship had frightened Sam. Where was the happy yellow Camaro he had tentatively begun to call friend?

After a while the unnerving Warrior had submerged again and the quirky, familiar Bee had taken its place. But he never forgot. And suddenly every song, every gesture, every word held a sour note of _wrongness_. The cardboard cut-out, inflatable doll no longer seemed real; he itched to peel back the thin top layer of skin on the Bee onion, but didn't quite dare. He dreaded what he would find beneath, or how many false personalities he would have to sift through to get there.

Anyone thousands of years old, not to mention someone killing in a brutal war for thousands of years, was bound to have a whole collection of skeletons in the closet.

As he slowly turned to take in Bee's motionless form, it was hard to reconcile the scratched, docile, inanimate car before him with the merciless, uncannily graceful defender that had only days before smashed in the face of one demented robot and literally ripped the spine from a second. What do you say to your savior? How do you prove yourself to someone who would come running at your panicked call and kill for your without a second thought?

"So...what's up?" Not the most brilliant thing that had ever come out of his mouth.

But Bee didn't seem to mind the laid back greeting. With a barely audible rumble he started his engine and rolled forward until his front bumper was barely six inches from Sam's shins.

"At the moment? The ceiling."

The sound of Bee's actual voice rather than a canned snippet of dialogue raised his spirits. A little. Contact with the Allspark over a year before had healed whatever damage had prevented him from speaking in anything but rasping wheezes. Like all the Autobots, his voice was smooth, measured, masculine. One of the first questions he had sprung on his guardian after the flurry of activity in the wake of Mission city had begun to calm was why, if the Autobots were genderless, did all their voices posses a male inflection? The answer he received was simple, if troubling in its starkness of perception-- to humans, male voices carried more power, authority and, ultimately, more credibility. The sad thing was, he had to concede that they were right. If Optimus had started speaking with a woman's voice when they first met, he might not have been as inclined to follow his instructions as if they were the word of God.

"Hardy har-har. Like I haven't heard _that_ one before," He glanced nervously to the other vehicles sitting silently nearby. He kept his voice low, hoping not to wake them if they were trying to sleep. Recharge. Whatever.

"There is no need for reticence. Your presence does not disturb us."

Sam jumped slightly at the interjection from the Hummer search and rescue vehicle sandwiched between a black Topkick and a Peterbilt truck. Its dark interior disturbed him a little. Like talking to a ghost. (And ghosts have a habit of coming back, don't they? Megatron was dead dead dead and then he was alive again...)

Then he blushed faintly, feeling stupid. Of course, his mere footsteps were loud enough to alert their audio sensors of his entrance. He also fervently wished he knew what 'reticence' meant.

"Uh...right." Once again, he astounded himself with his own brilliance. Way to go, Sam. "I guess I just wanted to see if you guys were, you know, okay. Not that you wouldn't be, no reason for you not to be, you're as tough as nails after all-- tougher, actually-- and that's great because there were an awful lot of decepticons and ancient voodoo robots blowing shit up-- not that I didn't think you could beat them, you guys are awesome, awesomely strong and fast, no reason why you shouldn't beat them--"

"Sam, what is the matter?" Bee interrupted him softly, inching forward until Sam could feel the warm, vibrating metal pressing up against his legs.

What's the matter? Everything. Nothing. No one died, they're all still together in one piece, but it was so close to being a planet-ending disaster that he can still taste the bitter bile of fear, a yawning chasm of hopelessness and despair opening up to swallow him whole. There was so much blood, so much pain, so much fear and desperation and keeprunningkeeprunning that it soaked in like a sponge and won't go away--

He swallowed. Hard. "Nothing. Nothing's the matter. I'm cool."

"I still do not understand the purpose of such a nonsensical phrase," Ironhide huffed out, grinding his tires back and forth, "Your body temperature has remained a constant 98.623 degrees fahrenheight, indicating that no 'cooling' has taken place."

Sam gave a weak little chuckle. "I can't believe no one's explained it to you yet, what with all the time you spend hanging out with us humans and all. Especially the military types. From what I've heard, they have their own_ language_, though I'm pretty sure 'cool' is in there somewhere. What I mean is, I'm--" (don't grimace, don't grimace) "--fine."

The feel of Bee's bumper against his shins began to make his skin crawl. He took a minute step back, relieved when the disguised transformer did not follow him.

"So...how are you guys holding up? Aside from, you know, working out the dents from just having a knock-down drag-out fight against the devil incarnate," he forced his voice to remain steady, keeping his eyes fixed on the crescent of steering wheel he could see through Bumblebee's windshield no matter how they itched to slip away and linger on a certain flame-decorated truck. (--dead dead dead, all to save me, not running even from two, three, four decepticons all at once, a defiant 'I'll take you all on!' ringing out like a trumpet, a battle cry as he went to the cross--)

He drew in a deep breath. Held it, fluttering, in his chest. Scanned the walls, the ceiling. "Sorry they stuck you down here. Can't say I like what the interior decorator did with the place. Still, at least you don't have to put up with curious sailors staring at you all the time."

"Our injuries were, for the most part, minor, Sam. Ratchet patched us up, and our internal repair systems are taking care of the rest," Bee soothed, ignoring his attempt at misdirection.

Ratchet made a sound suspiciously like a snort. "Still, it will be better when we finally reach Diego Garcia. I do not have access to all the materials I need to complete all the repairs on board this ship, but I did manage to convince them to set up a rudimentary medical bay back at NEST headquarters. It is not as advanced as I would prefer, but it will certainly serve to get the job done."

Sensing an undercurrent of anxiety to the words, Sam could not help but dart a glance to the imposing figure of Optimus Prime. His stomach folded itself into knots at the horror-filled thought that he had not yet spoken _because he could not speak_. Not quite daring to ask outright, and hoping beyond hope that the other autobots would not sit there calmly conversing with him if their leader were in immediate danger of dying once more, he deliberately misunderstood the implied urgency.

"Are we, like, in danger of Starscream swooping in and taking pot shots at us when there's no where for us to go but the bottom of the ocean?"

Even as the words bubbled up through his throat he dreaded the response.

"No," Ironhide huffed, "'Screamer may be one scary bastard on the battle field, but in general he's a coward. Neither he nor Megatron left without serious injuries, I made sure of that. They won't risk an attack unless they're sure they can win, and with only two of them even moving about, half of us could probably sit out the fight and we'd still win."

"Oh. Well, good."

"_'Have no fear, have no fear_,'" Bee chirruped, "_'I'll take care of you, kid!_'"

The heavy, laden parasite in his chest began to writhe and squirm.

"We will protect you and your family, Sam," Optimus Prime intoned firmly, causing Sam to flinch violently in a sort of whole body jerk. He hadn't realized the powerful autobot was even aware of their conversation. But along with the shock came a profound sense of relief. Muscles he hadn't even realized were clenched slowly relaxed. He didn't know much about robo-anatomy, but he assumed that some basic principles were universal; talking = conscious = not-on-death's-door.

Optimus' tone changed, growing softer, carrying a note of solemn promise that seemed inexplicably regretful. "You need never fear decepticons again."

A crushing flood of guilt washed over a mental dam and drowned him in the frothing tide. His stomach soured; he fought back the urge to throw up. Aware of the flushing red coloring his ears he turned to studying his hands, picking at the mitten-like bandage covering the burn he'd acquired when Jetfire had done that freaky light show that dumped them in Eygpt.

He murmured softly, "It's not Decepticons I'm afraid of."

He never saw Bumblebee move, it happened so fast. One moment there was a car before him and the next-- flashing, whirling parts spinning outward; sliding, clunking, reforming-- he was staring up at a super-advanced alien robot (way too advanced to be Japanese). Having reverted to his natural form, Bee lowered himself until they were face to face, boy to robot, one alien to another.

"Sam," for the first time in months, Bee's voice emerged strained, "there is no need to be afraid of us. We would never, _ever_, hurt you."

Sam jerked his head up, stunned by the words. Gobsmacked that his whispered comment had been interpreted in such a manner, he responded without thinking.

"Maybe not on_ purpose_--"

This time, Bumblebee jerked away from _him_. And hearing the short, mournful whine the yellow autobot gave, his mobile antenna flattening to his helmet, he felt truly sickened with himself. A large hand reached out to him (a comforting finger resting on his shoulder, hand wrapped around his side and cupping his back, stargazing together-- which one is Cybertron?) but pulled away again slowly before making contact, fingers curling inward.

"No, wait! That's not...that's not what I meant. I wasn't talking about you guys!"

"And yet you are afraid of us, if only subconsciously," Bee said quietly, voice only a whisper of sound. His radio was dead. Utterly dead.

Sam wanted to deny it. Needed to deny it with the same itching, burning compulsion that had driven him to the cargo hold in the first place. He even opened his mouth to do just that. But for some reason his proclamation of unwavering faith got twisted around on the journey from his mind to his tongue and became, "Look, my conscious and subconscious are so mixed up right now I don't know what I'm afraid of, okay?"

"Hey Sam!"

For the second time that morning he spasmed as though tasered. Turning on his heel he found Mikaela standing in the doorway looking sleep-rumpled, irritated and utterly gorgeous.

"Um. Hey, Mikaela." Mr. Smooth Operator.

"Everyone's been looking for you, Sam. Why didn't you come to breakfast?"

"Because I was here, obviously. As in, standing. In this room. Talking."

She only rolled her eyes and smiled indulgently, sauntering forward to grasp her mentally impaired boyfriend by the sleeve and tug him along after her, back towards the door.

"We'll see you guys later at the debriefing," she tossed to the autobots, "I have to go make sure my absent-minded boyfriend eats something before all that's left is congealing bacon grease. Later."

Sam twisted to look back over his shoulder, heart contracting painfully at the sorrowful hunch to Bumblebee's frame. "Yeah. Like she said. Bye, Bee," he added softly.

The door closed, cutting off the view. He resisted the urge to bang his head into it until it left a dent or two.

The mess hall was crowded, but not so crowded that they couldn't find two seats together. Unfortunately, they ended up at the same table as Simmons and Galloway. Needless to say, no soldiers had been inclined to eat in their company. Sam groaned as Mikaela began to bee-line for the two losers, tray held like a viking battering ram before her. Catching up, he playfully bumped his hip into hers and leaned down to whisper in her ear.

"Come on, 'Kaela. Simmons? _Simmons_? Let's go find someplace else."

"There IS no place else, Sam," she responded loudly, loud enough for the two adult losers to hear, a touch of agitation coloring her tone. With a resigned sigh he set his tray on the metal table top and seated himself beside his girl friend. (..Sam! Do you hear me!? I said I_ love_ you!...)

"Ah, look who deigned to come sit with us mere mortals!" Simmons observed mockingly, "It's resurrection boy and his hotty girl friend!"

Sam graced him with a lukewarm glare before turning his attention to opening his carton of orange juice. He liked orange juice. Every morning he could get it, he used it to wash down a granola bar before darting off to class (two days, he had been in college for TWO DAYS) or to school or to Miles' house. It energized him more than coffee without making him spaz out like he was high. His mom encouraged him to drink it because of all the health magazine articles she had read about the benefits of vitamin C. He humored her and pretended to choke it down for her sake when really he would have drunk it any way, without any vitamins at all. It made her happy and proud of him, so he supposed it was worth it to play along.

But when he peeled open the white lip of cardboard he froze. Orange juice, contrary to its name, was not actually orange. It was yellow. Yellow like Bumblebee's armor. (Bursts of energy exploding like bombs, louder than fireworks, hot enough to melt steel, valiant yellow melting, melting, sloughing away into the sand--)

"Sam, you okay?"

Mikaela's fingers ghosted over the back of his hand. He blinked, realizing he'd been staring down into his carton of juice for a long time. Slowly, he folded it closed again and pushed it away from him, all the way to the other side of the table. He was losing his mind.

He looked up to see Simmons watching him with a guarded expression, but when the man felt his gaze he returned his attention to mutilating an egg on his plate.

"Don't go all loco on us, kid. You, her, and that jar head seem to be the only ones the big guys trust," he advised sternly, pointing him into submission with a fork.

"Which is ludicrous, considering he's a teenager," Galloway ranted mulishly in return.

"Hey! I'm have you know I'm eighteen. I can smoke and buy a house and everything."

The sallow-faced politician, resembling nothing so much as a rumpled vulture swimming in a garish 80's jacket not unlike his own, hacked at his own breakfast without looking at them. "Oh yes. Because both of those things make one so mature."

Simmons looked at him. "You did go see that shrink, right robo-boy?"

Sam pulled a face around a bite of bacon. At any other time it would have been pretty good. But for some reason, he felt like he was chewing wet cotton. Completely tasteless.

Worried that being caught up in a fire-fight with thirty-foot-tall aliens bent on rending you limb from limb and destroying your planet would cause some amount of psychological stress, a faceless bureaucrat had made an hour-long counseling session with an onboard shrink a requirement for every human member of the survival party. If they had thought they could have pressed the autobots into obeying them, they probably would have requested that the alien robots do the same. (snicker) Sam would have almost taken facing Frenzy again to get out of it. Almost.

When his turn had come, he entered the closet-sized office with as much trepidation as a doomed man presenting himself to the firing squad. The hospital-green walls and musty old couches crammed into the space did little to put him at ease. Neither did the plastic smile of the thirty-something woman behind the laminated desk.

She asked him his name. He told her.

She asked him about his childhood. He told her.

She asked him about how he met the autobots. With only slight hesitation, he told her. If she was asking to begin with, she must have already been given the security clearance to hear the tale.

She asked him how he was feeling. He stared at her. Then he laughed. Laughed a hollow, sharp-edged laugh.

Eventually he got sick of her trying to pick apart his mind like he was some lab specimen, asking him to just tell her everything like she was his best friend (_Bee. Bee._ Bumblebeeeeee!!!) and not some complete stranger who really didn't give a damn and whose whole world existed inside a text book. If she could have known, if she had been there, if she had run with him through that city, faced down the real life monsters with him, watched humans flicked aside like bugs with him, screamed for help when none was coming with him, cried for the life of a sacrificed friend with him, then she wouldn't be asking him any questions. She wouldn't have anything to say. Anything at all.

All told, the only thing his 'therapy' session had accomplished was to give him the firm conviction that there was someone in middle management who owed him an hour of his life back.

"Yeah. I did." Sam shrugged, "Fat lot of good it did me."

Galloway scowled. "You probably weren't even trying. It's not a miracle cure, you know. You have to work at it."

His hand tightened around his fork until he thought it would bend in half. He looked up with a half smile, tendons standing out on his arm, and replied cheerfully, "You are absolutely correct. I didn't try at all! Maybe I'll schedule in some acupuncture next, you know," he shrugged again, scrunching up his face in a jovial expression of thoughtfulness, "Just to say I've done every piece of useless bull shit I possibly can. I'll hire a feng shui guy right after that to round out the list. And if I can find a carnival psychic, I'll throw him in too."

"Sam!" Mikaela hissed at him. Her livid expression surprised him, but it only added fuel to the fire.

"Don't you agree? I mean, I don't know about you guys, but somehow talking about my 'feelings' doesn't make the world go back to being happy smiling rainbows and unicorns."

"That's it," With shocking vehemence, Mikaela slammed her cup down on the table, pushed her chair back and stood up, "If you're going to act like a spoiled brat who wants to go cut his wrists in the bathroom every time something bad happens I don't want to eat breakfast with you anymore."

Feeling like a runaway plane that just flew into a boiling thunderstorm without realizing it, Sam found all his ire draining out of him.

"Mikaela, wait!" He reached for her arm as she snatched up her tray in preparation of stalking off. Some little part of him glowed with happiness that she did not jerk away from his touch. Sighing deeply, he slipped his hand around her wrist and gently rubbed the dip in her palm with his thumb, feeling her rapid heartbeat beneath his touch. "I'm sorry, okay? What's wrong? You've been wound up all morning."

Shaking her head, she reluctantly folded herself back into the chair beside him, rotating her arm so that they clasped hands beneath the table.

"Not ALL morning," she corrected grumpily. The ice in her eyes thawed with warmth as she looked at him, but as she grudgingly turned to face Galloway they hardened over again. "HE can tell you what's wrong with me."

Looking affronted, the older man brought a fist down on the table. "Now look here, I haven't the faintest idea what's caused all this madness--" he indicated with a waved hand the mess hall in general, "--but I assure it has nothing to do with me."

Simmons, looking far too gleeful at the lovers' spat, glanced at Galloway before raising a lewd eyebrow in Mikaela's direction.

"Something you're not telling your boyfriend, girly?"

A glare hot enough to melt decepticon armor washed over him without apparent impact.

"Get your prevented mind out of the gutter," she turned her heat vision on Galloway, "Does the word 'debriefing' ring any bells?"

Now looking confused, affronted, and mildly disturbed all at the same time, he glanced between Sam and Mikaela without comprehension.

"Well, yes! Debriefing is standard procedure after the completion of any military mission. When the situation calls for it, all civilians that are deeply involved are included as well. But what does--"

Rolling her eyes, Mikaela turned away from him to face Sam head on. He gulped, not liking the sympathy-filled look on her face. She normally only used it on little kids, dogs, and decepticon spies she was threatening with a torch.

"You can't go back to college, Sam."

……………

Author's note: Never fear, this isn't the end of the story. This chapter, however, has begun spiraling out of control and this seemed like an acceptable place to end it for the moment. Additionally, it's 1:30 am and I'm bushed. So no more tonight, folks.

Needless to say, this two-shot will become a three-or-more-shot.


	3. Red bottle, Blue bottle

Never let it be said that Mikaela liked to beat around the bush.

Sam croaked incoherently for a moment, then managed to eke out, "What? _Why_?"

She shook her head, reaching for his hands and squeezing, hard. "I don't know. I couldn't find out more than that. It must be classified or something."

Feeling like someone had just knocked his chair out from under him, he looked from Mikaela to Simmons to Galloway and back again. A disbelieving grin crept across his face, and he huffed out a breathless chuckle.

"What, is missing the first week of school punishable by expulsion or something? Did my parents not foot the bill on time and they decided to put me on probation?"

"Even those two aren't dumb enough not to know how to sign their names to a check," Simmons sneered. Sam rounded on him.

"Hey! You leave me parents out of it! Remember that rule, 'if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all'? Well, that's what we're going to do here," he motioned to all the occupants of the table with a circular window-washing motion, "Only positive vibes allowed."

"Sam," the feel of a warm body leaning towards him refocused his gaze on Mikaela, "_I _don't know why they don't want you going back to college, but supposedly they're going to tell us at the debriefing."

Maintaining his upbeat grin with furious determination, he concentrated on trying to breathe around the stone lodged in his chest. Normalcy: college, parties, tests, marriage, kids. Was that too much to ask? Never mind that he'd only saved the world TWICE and all. The floor just kept tilting and tiling away beneath his feet with no indication that it would ever right itself.

"Great, so when is it?"

Eyebrows pulling up in the middle, an uncomprehending blink of fathomless blue eyes, and Mikaela reluctantly dropped his hands. He instantly missed their warmth. Her distrusting posture-- leaning back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest-- clearly indicated that she wasn't buying his act for a moment.

"At ten. They want us to meet in conference room 52 on level 3 so they can pick our brains about what happened and how, precisely, one of the eight wonders of the world ended up a pile of bricks."

"Not to mention, the cat's out of the bag now!" Simmons intoned with a distinctly accusatory air, "Everyone in the world saw that nasty robot piece of work announcing the end of existence on network television! There's going to be hell to pay, that's for sure--" he aimed a predatory glance at a suddenly nervous Galloway, "--and more than a few head are going to roll."

"Why have the debriefing now, then?" Two sets of eyes turned to look at him with expressions that clearly stated when they thought of his IQ, "I mean, why not as soon as everyone was discharged for the infirmary? Why did they wait a few days?"

Simmons took a noisy slurp of coffee. "It's all thanks to you, matrix boy. Those big alien friends of yours insisted that stopping a worldwide outbreak of terror could wait until everyone was absolutely positive that you weren't going to drop dead of a heart attack!"

Uncharacteristic fury flooded him with heat. Hadn't he survived this far? Hadn't he done what they could not, without armor or guns or giant glowing swords? He accepted that, as a human, he was physically (perhaps mentally) inferior to the alien visitors, but assuming he was going to stress himself into a heart attack was downright insulting.

"I'm not_ that _fragile!" He spat.

Galloway gave him a strange look. "Well obviously you weren't enrolled in a medical program, because if you had been you would have realized that anyone who has just suffered a near death experience and been revived via defibrillator is in danger of a post-trauma relapse: i.e, a heart attack."

And just like that, all the air left his rapidly swelling balloon of righteous indignation with a small farting noise.

"Oh."

He blinked, trying to refocus his thoughts, and his gut crammed itself into a hard little knot as his mind circled back to the one problem he didn't want to feel or examine. Optimus' death had hurt like a sudden hole blown through his chest-- he kept walking, kept moving, kept living, but a large part of him ached and sobbed with emptiness (itsallmyfaultitsallmyfault). _This_, however, conjured a different type of pain. The thought that he would not be able to return to college, get a degree, _make_ something of his life, hurt the way an invisible fist squeezing his insides together might. Only a sliver of dimly realized determination prevented him from being swallowed up by the pain. Maybe it was stubbornness. Maybe it was courage. Maybe it was a rock-headed, foot-planted, tantrum screaming desire to do whatever he wanted to do anyway, government impositions be damned. But whatever the feeling that drove him, it lodged a flinty gleam of will-not-surrender in his eyes that felt dangerously similar to the will-not-die that had only just begun to fade. And if his survival record was anything to go by, that feeling usually caused him to get his way, simply by virtue of refusing to back down.

He swallowed, took a deep breath in through his nose, and spoke, "They may have their reasons for not wanting me to go back to college, but they have no right to stop me. I paid for it, didn't I? Well, my parents did, but that's not the point. You'd think that after all this they'd trust me to take care of myself. Besides, since when did the government take any real interest in one person's well being?" He tried to snicker at his own little anti-government joke, but the attempt fell flat. Though seeing Galloway appear so grievously affronted was enough to bring a tiny smile twitching to life.

"Young man," the politician began, working for a thunderous tone but ending up with something two steps short of nagging, "I don't know what shenanigans you and your alien buddies have gotten up to in the past--"

"Here we go," Mikaela muttered, propping up her chin with one hand.

"And you mind your manners, young lady! --I don't know what rules you've broken in the past, Mr. McWilly, and frankly I don't care. But what we're dealing with here is very serious business! Can you even comprehend the sheer magnitude of what has occurred? Everyone knows your little secret, now, and all those taxpayers whose money is going into funding your friends' globe-trotting romps are going to wonder if it's a worthwhile investment! Not to mention all the foreign nations that are going to question if we plan to turn these alien weapons on them-- they might just launch nuclear missiles on the US as a preemptive strike!" He paused for breath, crouching forward to spear him with a well-manicured finger, "So you _damn well_ better do whatever they tell you to do, because it may just save your own life as well as millions of others!"

Sam stood slowly and picked up his tray, feeling as though he had just been flash frozen in liquid nitrogen. His rib cage wouldn't expand, but suddenly he didn't feel the need to breathe. The dark, empty stare he leveled on the petty-minded man was utterly cold. He hadn't hated Megatron, not even after the evil alien killed Optimus. All he had felt was terror, terror and the animal need to_ flee_ from a predator. For a while, he had naively thought he lacked the ability to hate. But now he knew otherwise, and for the barest sliver of an instant he hated Galloway with a passion that frightened him to the core. How DARE the man accuse him on not comprehending the danger when _he_ had never been the target of over a dozen enraged aliens that could each destroy a city without straining a muscle cable, aliens that had sought above all else to crush him into a pulp? _He_ had never heard the sickening crunch of bone as a human was flicked aside like an annoying bug. _He_ had never had to look into the face of evil and defy it, knowing that defiance meant certain death!

There were many things he could have said or done, most of which would have been very gratifying but not very mature. But instead, he stated calmly, "No."

And he turned towards the tray busing station, fully intending to leave without ever looking back. He refused to give the man the satisfaction of seeing him tremble. "Come on, Mikaela. Let's go say hi to Bee and the others."

"Yes, _do_ go skipping off to see your alien friends," Galloway called after him, the elevated tone of his voice causing more than a few heads to swivel in his direction. The hair on the back of Sam's neck began to prickle as the curious stares fell heavily on his wooden form. "And while you're there, inform them that that their days as free agents are numbered!"

Unable to take another step, Sam came to an abrupt stop. His knuckles whitened on the edge of his tray. An anchoring touch brushed his arm as Mikaela pulled up alongside him.

"No problem," he ground out, astonished that his voice remained level and even pleasant, "And while I'm at it, I'll deliver the lace-trimmed invitations to come take over the world to the decepticons."

"The_ 'decepticons' _would not even be an issue if Sector Seven had simply finished what it started with that yellow one--"

Before the words had finished leaving his mouth, a strange buzzing filled Sam's ears and blocked out the riotous noise of the mess hall. Without even being aware of moving, he flung himself around and lunged towards Galloway. The tray in his hands came up, and with every scrap of strength in his body he brought it swinging around and smashed it into the side of the startled man's head. Globs of food splattered their clothes and slopped across the table, the tray following the meal in quick succession as Sam abandoned it in favor of fisting his hands in the front of the man's shirt. Though Galloway had at least three inches and twenty pounds on him, Sam hauled the politician from his chair, toppling it with a clatter, and slammed him into the wall as if he were little more than a sack of flour.

As frantic hands started to grasp his shoulders, pry at his fists, he became aware by parts of a sordid litany pouring from his throat and over his tongue and teeth-- _I'll kill you! You hurt him and I'll kill you! I'll kill you, you sorry bastard!_

"Sam, stop! Stop!" Mikaela.

Blink. The world came back into focus.

Panting breaths snorted from his nostrils. Icy sweat stood out on his temples, trailed a slick line between his shoulder blades. Little by little his fists unclenched, and suddenly firm, insistent hands were pulling him away, sandwiching him between Mikaela on one side and Simmons on the other. One touch warming, the other repulsive, but he couldn't find the strength to care either way. He was still shaking, still shaking like a leaf, hearing the echoes of metallic screams and fighting the bitter sting of cryo guns to no avail while the gentle, friendly robot continued to thrash and wail, clawing the concrete, but it was so cold and he couldn't reach him and no matter how he fought he wasn't strong enough to stop them, stop the torture, and still the sacrificial lamb _screamed_--

"If you hurt them, I'll kill you." Calm. So clichéd it was almost silly. Deadly serious. He stared deep into hazel eyes widened with fear and repeated the solemn promise. "I will kill you."

Mikaela was saying something, strong fingers pulling at him, leading him away like she would soothe a snarling dog, but the words dropped through the air without impression, uninteresting as pieces of gravel. He couldn't hear her voice, or feel her touch, or smell the raspberries of her hair. All the world was pounding white static, and he was adrift in its fog. The killing rage had banked, but only just, leaving him with the feeling that his skin would crawl from his bones to escape the pointless _nothingness_ fear and senseless death had striped the world to. Crawling, itching, insatiable need overcame him again, but this time it was the need to get away. There were too many people, too many stares cherishing him, hating him, ignoring him, fearing him.

With a sudden burst of will he wrenched himself away from the grasping cage of hands. He pushed back through the crowd, startled when it yielded to let him pass (black gloved hands restraining, throwing him back-- Bumblebeeee!).

"Sam, wait!"

He whirled and fled.

Metal lined halls narrowed before him, all stark angles and primitive technology that buzzed beneath the fluorescent lights. His pounding footsteps reverberated from the low ceilings-- the snare drum beat to the wild, fluttering rag-time of his heart. Sometime between sprinting from the mess hall and skidding around the first two corners, a giant magnet of unknown design had started up deep in the bowels of the ship. It pulled at his heart and soul like gravity, teasing him at every descending stairwell he passed, calling him down to familiar leather seats and shining blue optics that gazed at him with some emotion he dared not name. But ever the champion of heroic efforts, he resisted the siren song, only running as far as he could without going up or down. When finally he could no longer hear the chorus of voices calling after him he slowed to a walk.

Ketchup and eggs made for an interesting fabric die. Leaning against the wall, he plucked his shirt away from his body and made a few feeble swipes at the leftovers festooning his government-issue clothes (anything to keep from swiping at his eyes-- tears are like the monsters under the bed, pretend they're not there and they'll go away). Quickly realizing his efforts were a lost cause without soap and running water, he struck out to find a washroom (--wash away the blood, wash it away like it never existed--).

Finding a toilet on an air craft carrier was a notoriously difficult undertaking. But luck was on his side, and he gratefully ducked into a bathroom only two hallways away, surprising himself with how giddy the fact that the mirror was not cracked made him. Definitely losing it, Sam. For the most part the bathroom itself could have fit inside the average closet. Only the basic amenities were included: a single stall and a urinal. And a sink.

The water came out of the tap lukewarm. Foggy memories of lectures on using cold water when removing stains came creeping out of the wood work, yet at the moment he could not muster the effort to care. He snatched a handful of paper towels to serve as a rag, shrugged out of his jacket and pulled his shirt up over his head. Oh yeah. Eggs and ketchup made the raunchiest puke-orange this side of the seventies. If he ever saw Miles again, he would have to tell him that for his next tie-dying project.

He pressed his palm into the soap dispenser. No soap. Uselessly rattling it didn't make any spontaneously appear, either. Deciding to hell with it, he plunged his shirt beneath the stream of water and started viciously scrubbing.

His jacket, crumpled on the floor, began to play 'Shake your Groove Thing' not a minute later. He ignored it.

After an eternity the song fell silent, then started up again. Sam kept scrubbing.

Pack-it-all-in-a-mini-cooper-and-send-it-over-a-cliff, lukewarm water alone seemed to do no more than make his shirt wet and unwearable. He needed to find some soap. (needed to run run run-- run boy, death's snapping at your heels!)

Not bothering to ring out his shirt, Sam turned off the water, scooped up his jacket and pulled out the blackberry vibrating like the energizer bunny on crack in his pocket. Another gift from the government. Not that he had had a phone to get trashed in the fight to begin with, but hey, if they were giving away freebies he was more than willing to take them off their hands. He pushed the talk button and held it to his face, flinging open the door to the bathroom and striding back out into the cramped hallway. (no where to run, no where to hide, 'I smell you, boy!'---)

Ignoring the tiny voice that immediately began to speak on the other end, he skipped the customary hellos and gushed cheerfully, "Sorry, Mikaela. I'm a little busy right now, trying to wash my shirt and all. Talk to you later." Without waiting for a response he hung up. And switched the phone off.

Now, where to find a janitor's closet? He tried every door he came to, finding most of them locked and requiring a security clearance key. Those few that opened lead to other hallways or rooms whose function he could not define. At last, however, he happened upon something that might have belonged to the janitor from hell's OCD big brother. It was larger than the bathroom by a long shot, and full of cabinets decorated with hazard tape and requiring a key to access. Those were towards the back, though, probably following the philosophy that a terrorist seeking them would be too lazy to cross the entire room to steal them and simply give up his nefarious plot. A simple floor-to-ceiling metal shelf held recognizable cleaning supplies, though no soap on first glance.

Sam draped his jacket and wet shirt over a shoulder high cabinet and started searching through the multi-colored bottles for a simple thing of soap. Cleanser, WD-40, Borax, Raid, Bleach, Ammonia, Windex, drain cleaner and so many others-- anything, seemingly, but soap. His skin started to crawl again, adopting an eerie paleness in the glow of the single bare bulb overhead. If he concentrated, he could almost imagine wires crawling beneath his flesh. But of course that was silly, because humans didn't have wires crawling under their skin (and cars don't stand up). It was also silly to look at the bottles and imagine them as things other than bottles. Because of course they were only bottles. But this squat green one looked like skids, and this yellow one with a orange label looked like Ratchet, and the blue windex with its white and red label could have been Optimus Prime in a weird game of make believe.

Where was that soap?!

He started pulling bottles from the shelves and letting them fall to the floor. Pinesol. Mr. Clean. Thunk, roll.

"Kitten-calendar-kitten-calendar-" he muttered under his breath, repressing a hysterical giggle.

Jazz. Ironhide. Arcee. RaTchet. Fall from the shelf, fall from grace. Thunk, rattle, roll.

"Kitten-calendar-kitten-calendar-kitten-calendar--"

Optimus. Bumblebee. Bee, Bee, Bee, Bee. All fall down dead.

"Kitten-calendar-kitten-calendar-kitten-ca---"

His phone started ringing, and the moment shattered. Sam froze, standing on tip-toe to clutch another bottle. Two entire shelves had been emptied; the technicolor evidence (all sloshing thankfully restricted to the specified containers) lay scattered around his feet.

He was almost certain he had turned off his phone, which meant that it should have been impossible for anyone to call him. But if living for over a year with a robotic alien had taught him anything, it was that the word 'impossible' usually didn't apply to cybertronians, especially when the subject at hand involved technology. If they could hack the US military computer system with only a few hours of effort, bypassing the 'off' status of a simple phone would be a cake walk.

Like waking up from a particularly twisted nightmare, the world suddenly snapped into focus around him, bringing with it a bewildered embarrassment (when had he taken his shirt off?) and a spark of the trembling awe that comes from stepping out of the path of a runaway bus without realizing it. Pressing his back to the cabinet, Sam slid slowly to the floor, rolling cleaning supplies out of his way as he went. Then he reached up and grabbed his jacket, dragging it over the side and letting it pool in his lap.

"_'Shake ya groove thang, shake ya groove thang, yeah yeah!--_'"

The vibrating blackberry found its way into his hand. The little device registered an incoming text message. Where there should have been the number of the caller printed on the screen was an incomprehensible string of staticky blocks and glitchy computer symbols. After about thirty repitions of the song he finally managed to gather the courage to accept the message.

BuzzingBee: where r u?

Unable to do more than simply sit there breathing, Sam didn't try to send a response, either to come clean or lie his ass off. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute, and the phone buzzed again. Accept message.

BuzzingBee: where r u?

BuzzingBee: where r u?

BuzzingBee: where r u?

BuzzingBee: come back :(

Hot, writhing guilt rose in his chest and tightened his throat. Fearing even more repetitions of the heart breaking plea, he swiftly reeled off a response.

SamuelW.: hiding

There. Short and sweet, revealing nothing while reassuring his best friend that he wasn't passed out somewhere from a 'post-trauma relapse'. Though he couldn't help but grimace at his lack-luster user name. He supposed there was a price to pay for a free blackberry.

BuzzingBee: why?

He swallowed, blinking back tears.

SamuelW.: need time to think.

For a long while the LED screen glowed up at him quietly, blank but for a garish American flag in the background. Just when he thought Bee might have accepted that for an answer and granted him the requested time, the phone vibrated in his hand and the glitchy symbols returned. He would never admit how glad he was that his friend had not left him alone.

BuzzingBee: think out loud.

SamuelW.: ???

BuzzingBee: talk to me

SamuelW.: i dont know what to talk about

BuzzingBee: why did u run off?

SamuelW.: dont want to talk about it.

SamuelW.: wait, how do u know about that?

BuzzingBee: mikaela came to find us when she couldnt find u. she told us what happened.

SamuelW.: so then u know why i ran off

There was another very long pause, then:

BuzzingBee: if u want to find another car, ill understand. nest gives us some $$ to use, i could buy u a new one

SamuelW.: what?? no, B. i don't want another car. i like having u

BuzzingBee: u r not worried i might be a threat to u?

SamuelW: no, i never thought that. im just mixed up right now, b. real mixed up.

BuzzingBee: thats not what galloway says

This time it was Sam who paused to collect him thoughts-- or rather, paused to unclench his fists so that he could type out a response.

SamuelW: hes a jerk. what has he been telling you?

BuzzingBee: he suggested to u that we r dangerous, and u hit him. maybe ur mixed up mind is afraid hes right.

Every fiber of his being rebelled again of the very idea, but previous experience with having to accept the unacceptable tempered his reflex flare of white-hot denial. Emotion asserted that Galloway was a pompous know-it-all who had his head so far up his rear that he could not comprehend the idea of two beings of unequal strength sharing a balanced friendship. His heart felt no fear around bumblebee. Reason, however, quietly inserted that a healthy respect of his friend's demigod power would not come amiss. It whispered that an alien friend's goals might be very different from a human friend's goals, and that in bonding himself to an alien he was entering into a hitherto unexplored twilight zone where a sign of goodwill might involve saving him from a slow death of old age by tearing his still-beating heart from his chest.

Long buried and ignored instinct told him that a lion was still a lion even if it laid down for a while with the lamb.

BuzzingBee: u have nightmares every night.

Blinking at the apparent non sequitor, it took him a moment to frame a reply.

SamuelW: how do u know that?

BuzzingBee: im ur guardian, sam. i never let u out of my sensor range. ur heartbeat is always much higher than it should b when u r sleeping. elevated heart rate suggests fear. fear is caused by nightmares.

SamuelW: aaand thats not creepy at all

BuzzingBee: what do you dream about?

Sam would have thought the answer was obvious, given how much time they had spent together.

SamuelW: u.

Another stretch of time, waiting.

BuzzingBee: u r my ally. my brother in arms. my friend. i will do anything i need to do to prove myself to u.

SamuelW: ???

BuzzingBee: do u want me to leave and never come back? i can do that.

BuzzingBee: do u want to disappear to another country, start a new life? i can take u there.

BuzzingBee: do u want me to bring u a rock from pluto? i can get it for u

BuzzingBee: do u want me to kill starscream? megatron? soundwave? i will destroy them for u

BuzzingBee: i will do anything not to be the demon in ur nightmares, sam.

No amount of will power could hold back the traitorous drops of moisture that streamed silently down the sides of his nose. It was such a wussy thing to do, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to care. Restrained sobs tore at his chest as he curled himself around the blackberry clenched between his hands, holding onto it like a lifeline. Wonderful, brave, loyal Bee. He didn't deserve to have the alien angel as a friend, not when he had already failed the most crucial test. The one time he had been called upon to protect the ageless robot had ended in disaster. And Bumblebee had become the living sacrifice to take their place. (Wind sucking him down, breaking his grip-- tumbling, falling through the air, nothing to hold onto, then suddenly Bee is there, Bee the guardian angel catching him as he falls-- they stab him with their harpoons, pulling him down with chains, swarming black rats eating him alive, spraying him with poison-- 'he's not fighting back!!'-- a broken voice crying, pleading, wailing, a hand reaching toward him-- _save me_-- and then the screaming stops and all is still, still as death--)

SamuelW: u got it backwards, B. im not scared of u, im scared for u. u think i like listening to u scream every nite?

BuzzingBee: not ur fault.

Somehow, Bee knew. He always seemed to know, even when he played dumb and pretended that he didn't.

SamuelW: i couldnt save u. i tried. i tried so hard. im sorry.

SamuelW: guess im a lousey sidekick, huh?

BuzzingBee: but u did save me, sam

SamuelW: unless im missing something, they still packed u on ice and carted u away

BuzzingBee: there r other ways to save someone. i have seen and done many terrible things, sam. i have been tortured worse than s7 could have ever hoped to do. when i came to earth, i was dead inside.

Sam had heard about moments like these. Some people called them moments of grace. Sam called it looking up and realizing there were stars. Reading the lines of text shining up at him, Sam knew, _knew_, that he was standing on the edge of something so very powerful it could not be explained.

BuzzingBee: do u know the most beautiful thing i have ever seen, sam?

SamuelW: i dont know. a supernova or something?

Instead of a text reply, his phone chirruped to indicate the string of glitchy symbols was sending him a picture. With only the faintest hesitation, he opened it.

An image of himself, as seen from an extreme high angle, flooded the tiny screen. Darkness enshrouded most of the scene, save for a faint light touching one side of his face. With an abrupt jolt he recognized the grassy hill he and Mikaela had climbed approaching the transformed Bumblebee for the first time. His own eyes gazed back of him, full of wonder and awe, so bright and--to his slight embarrassment-- innocent.

BuzzingBee: i have known nothing but war all my life. i did not think goodness and mercy existed anywhere in the universe as something other than abstract concepts. u didnt teach me how to fight, but u reminded me what we r all fighting for.

Shrieking, tearing, burning metal. Guns, swords, cannons, fangs. Lies. Hate. Darkness. Death.

Gentle hands lifting him. A reclined seat on a sleepless night. Endless patience to endless questions. Maimed, rising up, fighting back. 'I wish to stay with the boy,' 'I'll take you all on!', 'You are the person I care most about'.

Sam curled even tighter around the shining tether to the alien far below him, laughing and crying all at the same time.

SamuelW: Bee?

BuzzingBee: ?

SamuelW: when we get back, i owe u the wash and wax of a lifetime.

BuzzingBee: X D

* * *

Author's note: Alright. I lied. This is going to end up being a very LONG story based on the outline I wrote up this morning. Expect action, adventure, and double helpings of angst all around. And no matter what it may look like, this is NOT a bot!Sam or allspark!Sam story. That theme has been done to death, and I'm sick of it. Sam is just freaking out in this chapter, which is why he's acting all nutso.

And just so I don't have any disappointed readers out there, I will not be continuing with this super-amazing update pace for long. I do have a life, and it's been shouting at me through the window these past three days while I've been so wrapped up in my own little transformers world. So while I will try to update every week (every few days, if possible) don't come pouting if another chapter isn't up the next morning.

And never fear, Optimus WILL feature prominently in the coming story line, but I just had to get this little plot bunny out of the way.


	4. Unwelcome Surprise

A debriefing, as it turned out, was not nearly as cool or exciting as its drama-show name implied. After retracing his steps to his quarters to change into a clean shirt, Sam hiked up to level three and followed the lines of armed guards to room 52. Yet despite the spine-tingling intrigue conjured by the presence of such tight security, the scene he encountered beyond the doorway-- once he had been allowed to pass after surrendering his phone-- reminded him not so much of a CIA training room as a PTA office in a middle-America high school. Green carpet and bland beige walls added to the feel of stepping back in time to the waiting room outside the principal's office. There were more guards here, as well, standing sentry beside a closed door in the far wall. Coupled together with an absence of windows and the empty oval table dominating the space, the room could have served double duty as a Wallmart board room. Or an interrogation room.

Half of the scratchy upholstered chairs were already filled; Lennox, Epps and several other burly military types that could have only been his team clustered together on the opposite side of the table, surveying his entrance with the air of a mafia gang holding court. It seemed marines had a penchant for arriving early. Sam smiled uneasily and lifted a hand in greeting, relieved when the gesture was returned with a "Hey, kid" and a nod of acknowledgement.

The only other occupant of the table didn't seem aware of his entrance; Leo-- hunched over something in his lap, shoulders trembling slightly-- never raised his shaggy head (chia pet...he he) at the sound of the door opening. For an awkward moment Sam thought he was crying, but then a muffled howl reached his ears and he realized his ex-roomate was shaking not with sorrow but with laughter.

"Sam!" Leo jerked his chin in a signal to come closer, "Come look at this little piece of awesomeness!" And his hands tilted over the side of his leg to reveal a cell phone. With a panicked glance at the guards, Sam slid into the chair beside him and pushed the piece of contraband farther out of sight beneath the table.

"What are you doing?! They have _guns_!" he hissed. His warning went ignored as the exuberant teenager shrugged him off and turned the tiny device so that he could see the glowing screen.

"I happened to have this baby on at just the right time and caught aaallll the action! Watch."

A new window opened on the screen showing a paused video clip. He pressed a button, and the miniature actors sprang to life on their 2-D stage; an inch-long Sam, face contorted with almost comical amounts of rage, leapt at an unsuspecting Galloway figurine and bashed him over the head with a breakfast tray. Leo pressed another button-- the food sucked itself back onto his plate, and Sam pirouetted away from the table, back to his starting position. Clamping his lips together around a peal of unmanly giggles, Leo fingered the recording to life again. Scream, jump, wack. Repeat.

Sam's hand shot out and snapped the phone closed around another chibi head-bashing, cutting off the clip.

Leo pouted, but compliantly stuck the device back in his pocket. "Spoil-sport."

Contrary to Sam's first impression, the two guards were not oblivious to their whispered conversation and secretive antics. One had made his way around the table to stand behind them, and the two teenagers, absorbed in their guilty revelry, were blind to his presence until he dropped a heavy hand on Leo's shoulder, causing the teen to jump as though electrocuted and let out a squeal. Sam spun around as his ex-roomate jerked upright, moaning for the other boy's idiocy as the guard simply held out a hand.

"Phone."

Grumbling under his breath, flushed a deep scarlet, Leo reluctantly dug out the offending device and passed it over. Without a word the guard slipped it into a pocket of his vest and strode away.

Leo dropped his head onto the back of his chair and let out a quiet wail of despair.

"Awww man, this sucks! Thanks a lot Sam, you just lost me the winning vid on America's Funniest Home Videos," he paused, crossing his arms, "And no matter what anyone might say, I did _not _just scream like a girl. I was just surprised."

"Of course not."

"Not only did I not scream like a girl, I didn't scream at all."

"Definitely."

"Actually, I wasn't even startled. I just had to pretend like I was to keep _los jefes _happy."

"Had to keep them happy. Got it."

"And if you ever tell anyone otherwise, I know what room you sleep in. _Intimately_."

"Would you put a lid on it, kid?" Lennox snapped, his eyes gleaming the way they did when he threatened Agent Simmons of S7 with a gun.

Leo gulped, visibly backpedaling. "You got it, bro. No problem. Shutting up now."

But Sam wasn't listening anymore. The other boy had said 'sleep'-- present tense, as though when they finally docked in India and flew back to the US everything would go back to the way it had been, including Sam sharing a room with a techno geek who talked too much and had hair resembling a chia pet. Once more his universe had flipped upside down, and even someone who had survived the battle in Egypt with him, seen the very terrors that stalked his nightmares, had been left behind, left right-side-up. Because this time everything wasn't going to go back to normal. He had never bragged of being the brightest student in his class, true, but he had always taken a certain pride from being more quick-witted and clever than all the jocks and stoners and math geeks (and Megatron). And after scraping his way through the remainder of high school with better-than-average grades he had managed to achieve the previously unthinkable-- he had been accepted to an Ivy League school. That didn't matter now, though. None of it mattered. Though he didn't yet know the specifics, the fact that Galloway had not been surprised by Mikaela's announcement was tacit proof that the government was conspiring to keep him from going back to college. The second best thing he had ever done in his life, and they were taking it away from him. Just like that.

Leaning forward with his elbows braced against the table, he laced his fingers behind his neck and pressed his forehead into the synthetic wood grain (not real, nothing feels real). He stayed that way, tracing the pixilated patterns beneath his nose to find where they repeated, until the door opened again and his parents shuffled through.

"Sam! Oh, we were so _worried_ after we saw what happened at breakfast, weren't we, Ron?" His mother gushed, rushing towards him. Sam straightened at the sound of his name and hitched a smile on his face, docilely submitting to being crushed in a head-hug.

"Yeah, sure we were," his father clapped him on the shoulder, hard, "Did you break the bastard's nose?"

"Ron! You shouldn't be encouraging this aggressive behavior!" She mimed a cutting motion over Sam's head as though he could not see her, sinking into the chair beside him.

"Judy, he isn't Mojo."

"Maybe not, but the concept still applies."

"Am I in trouble?" Sam interrupted, tapping out a pattern on his knee to distract himself from the crushing ache of remorse engendered by their obvious concern. They didn't know yet that their baby boy would not be getting a college degree. Maybe not ever. "Cause I'm sure there's something in the rule book about self defense extending to harassment cases."

"He was harassing you?" His mother gasped at the same time his father growled, "What kind of harassment?"

Sam abandoned his tapping in favor of waving his hands in a physical halting motion.

"Not the kind you think! Not the pedophile, shouldn't-be-around-kids type, or even just the physical type. It was just, you know, just playground bully stuff. Teasing. That's all."

At the tail end of his speech the door opened again and Mikaela entered, sauntering towards him with a half-lidded gaze in her eyes. Sam groaned, knowing she had heard at least part of their conversation

"It wasn't just teasing, Sam," she sighed in exasperation, "Trent used to 'tease' you, but I never saw you attack him like that--"

"Not that you know of," he interjected with a cocky grin.

"--and you're not such a coward that you would run off and hide for hours at the drop of a hat."

She slid in between Sam and Leo, gracing the other boy with a winning smile and batting her lashes.

"Um, I believe this is my seat," she told him silkily. He gulped, mouth sagging open like a fish under the full power of her eyes, but he nonetheless held his ground.

"No way, _chica_. I was here first. But you're welcome to share with me." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. Mikaela bent towards him from the waist, clasping her hands between her knees.

"Let me rephrase that. I'm wearing steel-toed boots and I know how to use them. Now move!"

Faster than a rabbit fleeing a fox, Leo squirted from his chair and sought another farther down the table. "Moving!"

To the sound of Lennox and his team's laughter, Mikaela seated herself in the vacated chair and leaned against him, wrapped one arm around his back. In response he draped his own arm around her shoulders.

"You were gone a really long time, Sam. What happened?"

"I was in my room. Reading."

"Liar." She punched him in the arm with her other hand. It wasn't a girly punch-- his face muscles strained to keep from wincing. "I checked your room. You weren't there."

Glancing around at the many pairs of eyes watching the exchange with interest, he ducked his head to breathe against her cheek, "Not here, okay? Please, Mikaela. I just--" he took a deep breath, "--I just freaked out, alright? I don't know if I can talk about it. Now or ever."

A slim, warm hand reached out to grasp his, running a finger along the web of his thumb in a strangely erotic manner. Then, with a gentle squeeze that conveyed support more clearly than any words, it let go.

"Okay."

The door in the opposite wall chose that moment to swing open, and a wide assortment of decorated officers, suited bureaucrats, and pencil-pushers dressed in gray and carrying clipboards entered. A man with a square block of flashing metals sheathing one side of his chest took the helm. His steel gray eyes surveyed them with vague detachment, his arms clasping behind his back.

"Good morning. I am General Thatcher. Thank you for joining us."

"Like we had a choice," Leo muttered under his breath.

"Today is going to be a little unorthodox because so many of you are civilians. Just cooperate and answer any questions you are asked to the best of your abilities and we can all get on with our lives."

"Wait, where are Simmons and Galloway?" Mikaela muttered suddenly, looking around. Sam blinked, only just realizing that their group was not complete.

"You may have noticed that two of your number are missing," he continued, possessing either mind reading abilities or exceptional hearing, though his gaze never once lingered on Mikaela, "Simmons and Galloway, as agents past and present of the US government, are being interviewed separately for the individual portion of the debriefing. They will rejoin us once all of your solo statements have been taken, at which point the autobots will also join us for a video conference."

This announcement sparked murmurs of fear and anticipation from the small crowd. Some of the tension eased from Sam's muscles at the promise of being able to see his friends again so soon. The fact that Thatcher had not excluded Optimus meant that the giant robot must have been in good enough shape to participate. But it was the thought of seeing Bumblebee, even surrounded by so many others, that made his stomach do back flips. Had it really only been five hours since he had felt metal so warm, so alive, pressing with infinite gentleness against his legs?

Thatcher clapped his hands together, motioning to the suits accompanying him.

"That said, let's get started, shall we?"

One of the faceless gray bureaucrats stepped forward and began to speak, never taking his eyes from his clipboard.

"We will call you one at a time to give individual statements. You are not to discuss with anyone else what transpires during your interview until after every name has been called. Understood?" A few nods, but he continued without waiting for their acknowledgement. "First up--Captain Lennox."

Boredom was a concept not unknown to any teenager, especially Sam. But in the hours that followed, hours spent cooped up in the rapidly shrinking room as one by one the people around him disappeared into the inner chamber, the word 'boredom' took on a whole new meaning. It was no longer only a state of being-- it was a special place in Hell reserved for twitchy, slightly psychotic 18-year-olds convinced, with every passing moment spent in idleness, that a group of decepticons was amassing just outside the walls. First it was merely Starscream circling the ship, demon red eyes peering through layers of steel to watch his heart beat, waiting for the perfect moment to spear it with a laser the width of a hair. Then it was Starscream and Megatron, Megatron slowly but surely tearing the ship to bits without alerting anyone to his presence, tearing his way towards Optimus and Bee and all the others waiting unawares below deck. The next minute Soundwave joined the group, cutting off their communications so that they could not cry for help when the assault began. Soon, every slashing, raging, tearing metal monster wearing a purple badge he could dream up waited on deck to kill them all.

When his own turn came, it took several repetitions of his name to tear him from his waking nightmare. His hands had unknowingly become clenched together; he peeled them apart, shocked by the bruised crescents on the back of his left hand. He didn't remember feeling any pain.

They lead him back through a short corridor to an office almost identical to the one the shrink had inhabited. Nausea inducing colors, little decoration, plastic furniture. Having watched more cop and lawyer dramas than was probably wise, he expected them to use a good-cop/ bad-cop routine to try to catch him out in a lie. Instead, they told him to start from when he first met the Autobots and work his way up from there to the moment before he stepped into the office. For the most part he spoke uninterrupted (editing out Bee's attempts at match making and the make-out incident with the freaky, long-tongued robot), at times instructed to give greater detail about this or that event. It was rather cathartic, in a way, to simply let himself spew about all the things he couldn't spew to Miles (who usually assumed the position of spew- absorber). When he finished, they started asking questions he felt were rather redundant (describe those decepticons you mentioned again, are you sure there were thirteen?) but thankfully not too personal.

At long last the three pencil-pushers taking notes on their laptops and clipboards capped their pens and saved their documents, and the men-in-black wannabe prodding him through his tale handed him a bottle of water and sent him out. He drained the whole thing before he emerged back into the waiting room.

Apparently, he had been the last one to be called. When he returned he found the previously empty table not-so-empty anymore-- three hastily erected flat screen monitors stood at one end of the oval table, facing the assembled group that had clumped together at the other end for the best view. Sometime during his absence Simmons and Galloway had slunk into the room and now occupied chairs at the very back of the group. He glared at them both. Galloway scowled back. Simmons merely rolled his eyes theatrically and shook his head.

He slid into his seat beside Mikaela just as a techy stationed near the screens began typing away on his lap top, setting up the connection. Trying to hide the damage to his hand, he folded his arms and tucked the marred appendage against his side. More perceptive than he tended to give her credit for, Mikaela saw the motion for what it was and tugged his arm free, pulling his hand into her lap. As the vid-conference screens flooded with light, he felt her touch her lips to the place where he had bruised himself with his own fingernails. The light contact sent a zing of warmth racing down his limbs.

He leaned over to rest his chin on her hair. "I love you," he whispered.

"Since you said it first," she whispered in return, "I guess I love you too."

"Connection made. We're live, General," the techy announced.

Thatcher moved to stand at the apex of the table, centering himself in the black beady eye of the camera mounted on top of the center screen. "Good. Start the camera feed."

The monitors blinked simultaneously, and suddenly three familiar faces stared back at them, scaled down until each filled approximately that same space as a human head. Sam's heart fell-- Optimus Prime in the center, Ratchet and Ironhide flanking him. But no Bumblebee.

"Good afternoon," Thatcher started speaking, tone crisp and business-like, "Thank you for agreeing to this video conference. It would have been rather difficult to arrange such a meeting in the cargo hold, I'm sure you understand. As you may know or may not know, I am General Thatcher," he inclined his head slightly, "I believe we have already met, Optimus Prime."

Sam thought he detected a meaningful undercurrent to his words, but he could not possibly guess what it was.

"Indeed we have."

"Ladies and gentlemen--" he gestured grandly to the three screens, "For those of you who have not already become acquainted with the Autobots, I am proud to have the honor of being the first to introduce you. Center stage is Optimus Prime, the leader of the autobots and diplomatic head of all Cybertronians."

"Tell that to the Decepticons," Lennox muttered darkly, stirring up a smattering of nervous chuckles.

Sans battle mask, Optimus intoned, "It is an honor to meet you all. It is my sincerest wish that human-cybertronian relations will continue to develop with an air of mutual respect and cooperation in the future."

Thatcher lifted a hand towards Ratchet.

"To your left, I present you with Ratchet, Chief Medic and Science Officer of the Autobots."

"I do not have a full range of sensor data at my disposal upon which to base my conclusion, but it seems that you all look quite ill."

Despite his dismal mood, Sam managed to crack a smile.

"It's the lighting, Ratchet. Don't worry about it."

The medic turned to regard him with a look that on a human would have dripped skepticism.

"I am not so green as to be completely fooled by poor lighting, youngling. If I had my way this meeting would not have taken place for some days yet, but I suppose the damage is done now."

Flushing deeply, Sam ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck, feeling every gaze in the room swivel to focus on him with sudden scrutiny.

Thatcher cleared his throat and lifted a hand in Ironhide's direction.

"And on your right, last but not least, is Ironhide, the Autobot's chief weapons specialist and battle field strategist."

The sight that followed-- Ironhide crossing his arms and jerking his chin up with a laid back "What's up?"-- caused Sam and Mikaela to curl up and choke with laughter. Leo, Ron and Judy looked stunned and more than a little confused. Lennox and his team just smiled and waved in return.

"Nothing much, man. Nothing much. Been stuck in this room for hours, but that's 'bout it," Epps answered with a casual shrug, stretching his legs out in front of him.

"Sucks," Ironhide grumbled, gravelly voice somehow seeming sympathetic.

"After you are dismissed," Thatcher addressed the humans, sending a pointed glare at the still-laughing Sam and Mikaela that only caused Sam's sides to heave even harder, "You may, if you wish, meet the other Autobots on board the ship. That is, of course, if they are amenable to the idea." He directed the last statment towards Optimus, who inclined his head.

"We are."

Sam couldn't remember the last time he had laughed. It felt wonderful, even if it did seem that his cracked ribs would split apart again under the pressure. He simply couldn't reconcile the image of a cannon-toting, decepticon-blasting Ironhide with the jaunty slang of a boy from da hood. (And it tickled him to no end to hear a robot of any description say 'sucks' in that blasé tone they used with everything else.) The weapons specialist must have surfed the internet for more common idioms after his confusion with the word 'cool'. At last, however, Sam scraped together enough self control to calm his stomach-heaving peals of laughter into nerdy little giggles.

"Now, on to business." Thatcher clasped his hands behind his back again, stiffening his posture into a more serious pose. "As you all know, for a very long time we humans have been disinclined to believe in the possibility of aliens. If it were not for the fact that the existence of other life forms was broadcast worldwide less than a week ago, you would all currently be signing your way through a stack of non-disclosure agreements the size of a phone book. As such, you will _still_ be signing many, many forms before you leave this room, but they will only amount to slightly less than a phone book." The ironic humor in his words elicited a few weak chuckles, but they died at his next words.

"A grave crisis may have been avoided, but the Decepticons are still a dire threat to our national security and to people all over the world. Any little piece of information you have learned may, if spread without check through the community, provide them with the ability to do even greater harm."

"Now, more than ever, it is of greatest importance that we work together rather than at cross purposes to each other," Optimus spoke up, "The revelation of our existence may prove to be either a boon or a devastating blow, depending entirely upon how the world community chooses to receive us. The decepticons will try to turn the tide in their favor by sowing discord, as we cannot fight the greater evil while at the same time fighting amongst ourselves."

"So basically you need us to lie our asses off about how great you guys are," Ron summed up with a touch of disgust. Optimus turned to regard him. Sam shivered, grateful he wasn't the target of that revealing blue stare.

"What we need most is for you to say nothing at all," he rebuked calmly.

"Which is why, when you leave, you will be getting one of these--" Thatcher picked up a bound packet of papers the thickness of the paperback novel and held it up for illustration. "After we go over the immediate plans for the next few days, all civilians will be required to leave the room."

A light bulb went off in Sam's head, and he looked from Ratchet to Ironhide with new appreciation for their presence in a meeting that seemed to be more of a lecture than a conference. The soldiers would, of course, need to discuss tactics and battle plans with their robotic allies, and it appeared that the PTA-waiting-conference room would soon be put to use as a war room as well.

"We will dock in two day's time at a naval base on the Indian coast. From there, C-17's will airlift the Autobots and Lennox's team back to NEST headquarters. The rest of you will be put on a plane back to the states as soon as possible. Upon reaching US soil, you will be met by NEST agents who will convey to the temporary residences that have been set up for your use and remain in contact with you for two months' time in case you have any problems or feel the need to report any... _suspicious_ activity."

Discontented mutterings broke out across the room, along with more than a few protests against going anywhere but home.

But Sam only sat up straighter in his chair, feeling the first stirrings of panic begin to prickle in his chest.

"Wait," he objected, "What about Bumblebee? How's he going to get back?"

Thatcher turned to regard him heavily, the same inexplicable resignation he had felt in Optimus' voice earlier that day coloring his tone. "He will be accompanying the other Autobots via C-17 back to NEST headquarters."

"Which is where, exactly?" Leo piped up.

"That's classified."

Sam looked from Thatcher to Optimus, uncomprehending.

"So he's going to go with Ratchet and get repaired, right? And then you'll send him back?"

Suddenly none of the Autobots could look him in the eyes. His heart started beating faster, and the air grew too thick to breathe.

"He's only going to be gone for a little while. A week or two and he'll be back! Right?"

"Son..." Thatcher began. Sam sprinted ahead of him, cutting him off with a dire urgency to keep the words he knew were waiting on his tongue from materializing in the air.

"S-s-o that's the plan? They'll fix the dents, make him right as rain, and then send him home to me?"

"Bumblebee will be accompanying us to NEST, Sam," Optimus affirmed softly, voice impossibly soft.

Sam scarcely heard him. Black began to creep in along the edges of his vision. The floor tilted sideways and rolled away from under his chair.

"...But he will not be returning to the United States."

And the world inverted itself.

* * *

Author's note: This chapter is more like a part one of two. The original outline I worked up simply tried to cram too much into a single chapter, so I decided to break it in half. Forgive me if this chapter is a little bland in comparison to the others-- there were plot elements I needed to set up for the rest of the story, and my brain needed a break from constant overloads of angst. Nefarious plots, betrayals, and twin shenanigans will be revealed in the next chapter! So stay tuned! (and don't worry, it DOES have a happy ending, even if it takes a while to get there)

I probably won't be able to update until saturday night at the earliest due to the amount of time I'm going to have to put in the next two days to preparing for an staging a yard sale. But don't worry, I'm as eager to get to the next chapter as you are!


	5. Wanted

Many people who met the Sam limping from the Egyptian desert-- covered in bruises shaped like the hands of giants and proudly boasting of two cracked ribs, second-degree burns on his hand and numerous lacerations-- mistakenly assumed that he had only died once. No one but his parents and Miles knew that this presumption was technically untrue.

At six, buzzing with energy and full of enough curiosity to put cats to shame, he had decided that it would be fun to try to swim out to an island in the middle of the lake where they held their annual family vacation. Without a life vest and without telling anyone what he was doing (wanted it to be a surprise-- guess what I can do!) he boldly set off on this self-appointed quest. Though he could swim, he had never gone very far before and couldn't get the hang of floating. So when he could no longer touch the bottom, he was a little scared, but it was no big deal. He was a Big Boy, and as such he couldn't be afraid of anything. Soon, however, he started to get tired and decided that he didn't really want to go to the island after all. He tried to put his feet down-- and remembered that there was nothing beneath him but more water as his head sunk under the surface. Suddenly terrified, he came up for air, thrashing. He tried to float but kept sinking, and his limbs started to ache and scream with the need for rest, _but_ _he couldn't touch the bottom_.

Somewhere in all of that he got a lungful of water and flailed in panic, turning the wrong way around, going down instead of up. Years later he couldn't remember much of the details of what happened after that, save for the feeling of what it felt like to drown. Lungs cramping, straining, hurting with the need to _breathe _when there was no air to be found, surrounded by endless water in all directions, water that went down, down, deeper than a well or an abyss, down into the eternal dark.

Now, there was plenty of air. He was sitting in a chair, not splashing helplessly in the center of a lake. But the one being that, like his father, could have come diving to save him would not be arriving. And Sam was left adrift, fighting for air. (_please_, don't go...)

Back in the real world Mikaela came to his rescue. Features narrowing in tightly leashed anger, she speared Optimus with a glare containing slightly less wattage than a bolt of lightning.

"And what does Bumblebee have to say about this arrangement?" She questioned, tone hard with suspicion.

"_Bumblebee_ is one of my soldiers and therefore required to obey my orders. For the time being, at least, I believe it would be prudent for us to remain 'underground', as it were, and allow the media storm time to calm."

Thawing slightly, just enough to grab onto the thread of the conversation (breathe in slowly, don't let them see you gasp for air), Sam worked to make his voice sound calm and rational. He succeeded, barely. "But no one knows he's my car. Everyone looks at him and sees-- well, a _car_. Doesn't that count as being underground?" He paused to suck in a deep breath, taking in so much air that his abused ribs flared in agony, "Well, not technically underground as in beneath dirt, but underground as in no one knows where he is or what he is--"

"The United States government," Thatcher cut off his rambling, "Has also requested that all of the Autobots be present for the drafting of a treaty between our two peoples. Would you prefer that your friend be bound by a contract in which he has no say? Remember, too," he continued as both Sam and Mikaela opened their mouths to speak, "That your perfect disguise has already failed once, to disastrous consequences."

Thrown for a loop, the roaring hole of pain in his chest momentarily quieted as Sam racked his brains for a time when someone might have discovered their secret. He could not think of one incident, especially not one that had resulted in 'disastrous consequences'.

Seeing his look of blank incomprehension, Thatcher glanced over his head and prompted,

"Galloway? The file."

Sam twisted around in his chair as the politician rose and transferred the briefcase laid across his knees to the table. He watched, with growing apprehension, as the latch was thumbed back and the lid propped open, exposing a neatly organized stack of manila folders. Although Thatcher did not elaborate on his obscure order, Galloway seemed to know exactly what file he was looking for and swiftly extracted it from under the others, sliding it down the table to the General.

Without taking his eyes from Sam, Thatcher trapped the sliding folder under one hand and flipped it open.

"At 11:23 am on the second of September, 911 dispatchers in the New Jersey area received no less that 214 calls from students at Princeton university claiming that a 'metal monster' was in the process of destroying the main library."

Using all the care an antique vase collector would give to his priceless collection, Thatcher pulled no less than a dozen six by eight glossy photos from the file and arranged them on the table in front of Sam.

Beside him Mikaela gasped, lifting a hand to cover her mouth. "Oh my God. Oh my God."

Like miniature windows onto the aftermath of a tornado, each of the pictures showed a different view of the gutted library: light fixtures torn from the ceiling and hanging by their wires over dustings of shattered glass; eight foot shelves toppled like so many dominoes, their books spilled out over the floor; balconies and staircases torn into nothing but splinters; wood flooring marred by smoking furrows where blasts from an ion cannon had missed their mark; day light streaming in through a giant whole in one wall, scattered chunks of plaster all that remained from before it was blown into an impromptu doorway. And other things that made him want to turn away and retch-- human shaped mounds covered with blue tarps, pools of blood so dark it appeared black.

"Sam, what it the world is all _this_?" his mother blurted. She reached out a hand and started sorting through the pictures. "My God, there's blood _everywhere_!"

Unable to bear the shocked, silent gazes of the people around him, Sam moved to bury his face in his hands, lacking the strength to continue looking at the grisly records of an event that still continued to haunt him. --But then something occurred to him, something that glinted in his mind like the possibility of a loop hole. Almost as soon as his hands touched his forehead they sprang away again, smacking down on the table with sudden inspiration. Feeling that Thatcher was not the authority to whom he needed to make his appeal (so simple, why hadn't they already thought of it?) Sam turned his pleading gaze to Optimus.

"Look, this is bad, okay? I'm not saying it's not, because it is. But you've got this backwards-- that thing didn't come after me because of Bumblebee, it came after me because it happened to see me freaking out with all those weird symbols in my head." He twiddled his fingers by his temple for emphasis, striving to make him tone logical rather than begging, "So his cover hasn't been blown after all."

It was Ratchet, rather than Optimus, who refuted his chain of reasoning. "And why do you think the Pretender happened to be mimicking someone at the very school you attended, Sam?"

His heart plummeted, though he struggled not to lose that golden glimpse of a way out, refused to let the mirage out of his sight. "I dunno, maybe it was just scouting around, scoping things out!"

But Ratchet only shook his head.

"As I am the only one of the Autobots with scanners powerful enough to penetrate the disguise of a Pretender, it was my responsibility once Optimus' body had been secured to return to the school and seek it out, lest it attempt to return at another time-- repaired-- and finish what it started," he inclined his head meaningfully towards the array of photos scattered across the table.

"Given my ability as a medic to access the core processing unit of any other Cybertronian for the purpose of repairs, I was able to..._persuade_...the Pretender to reveal how it had come to your school. Sam, when Bumblebee transformed in your yard to deactivate the protoforms attacking you and your father, someone else was watching in secret."

Ice cascaded down Sam's insides. "Starscream," he mouthed breathlessly.

"No. _Soundwave_," Ironhide corrected. The way he stressed the name lent it a certain menace, hinted at an evil darker than even Starscream could contend. "The same Pit-blasted Decepticon that discovered the location of the Allspark shard and Megatron's corpse."

Feeling that he was somehow missing a crucial piece of information, Sam glanced at Mikaela and found Mikaela glancing at him in a similar manner. It was Leo, to his surprise, that made the connection.

"Satellites!" He breathed in awe, face lighting up the way a world-weary knight's would upon tripping over the Holy Grail, "That robot-- that Soundwave-- must have hooked up to a satellite and used it to look for any cars that spontaneously morphed into robots. Oh, that is so _wicked_!" He fisted his hands in his hair and bounced a little in place. If the situation were not so serious, and if his hands were not curling into fists beneath the table with the desire to punch his lights out, Sam might have found the geek-out to be rather amusing.

"Your description may be crude, but it is essentially correct," Ratchet huffed.

His father, looking increasing befuddled and outraged by parts, leaned forward and pointed a stubby a finger at Optimus, then Ratchet, then Ironhide, not seeming to know who to target.

"Alright, what is all of this about Pretenders and satellites and whatnot? And what about that thing in the desert? Why did it go and kidnap us and _try to murder our son _just to wreck a pyramid?!"

Thatcher road rough-shod over anything the Autobots might have said, replying sternly, "Mr. Witwikity, believe me when I tell you that the less you know, the less someone might try to torture out of you."

Paling to a stark white, his father slowly curled his extended finger back into his fist and lowered his arm, clamping his lips together. Sam caught sight of his other hand reaching for and tightly grasping his mother's under the table. The worm of remorse weighing heavily in his heart began to wriggle again at the sight of his parents-- his goofy, overprotective, _normal_ parents-- having to deal with a world that did not stop for a glass of wine and frequently did not contain its horrors to the six o'clock news. Two years ago he had longed for something, anything, to come crashing into his life and shake things up a little, give him an adventure to be read about in mass-market paper backs. Now, two years older and a hundred years wiser, he would have cut off his right leg and hand delivered it to Megatron to be able to go back to a time when the most dangerous thing he did on a daily basis was confront Trent and the closest he came to carrying the world on his shoulders was heading a group project on environmental decline ('_Take the cube and run!'-- 'I have to get this to Optimus!_'--).

Kids never realized how much they relied on their parents' ability to handle anything life might throw their way until the day when those selfsame parents could no longer handle it anymore. And suddenly those kids found themselves very alone, and very scared.

Staring, eyes unfocused, at the white-bordered collage of death and chaos spread out before him for his intimate viewing pleasure, Sam started to giggle. His hands found the arm rests and tightened around them, fingers digging into worn fabric; his lips twitched, pulling up and sagging again, not seeming to know whether or not to smile. Giggle, stop, giggle again.

"You know," he said conversationally, "This is just all so fucked up I can't even describe it. I mean, _woah_."

Finally, he managed to contain the bubbling outbreak of hysteria and his mouth settled itself into a flat, emotionless line. He couldn't process this right now, so he wasn't going to. "At least Bumblebee will be safe with you guys. The Decepticons wouldn't dare attack you all directly, so I don't have to worry about him getting blown up and stuff-- and he'd finally be able to transform and stretch his legs without worrying about being caught. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm glad that he's going," he ardently refused to believe he was starting to cry, no matter how much he blinked or how blurry Lennox's face was becoming, "I mean, he's an _Autobot_. He's a thinking, living person who's so strong and brave and selfless that it's _ridiculous_," (don't stop, don't think, take a deep shuddering breath), "he deserves so much better than to be living in a dumpy old garage."

Rather than acknowledge the way he had to swallow several times before he could continue, Sam hitched a wavering grin to his face and attempted to change the subject. (not coming home to me, not coming home to me-- Bee, come back!)

"I guess my school-- sorry, my _former_ school-- is pretty mad at me right now. Heck, I'd be mad at me too if I went and wrecked my library like that-- not that I did a lot of the actual wrecking, I don't have a gun, I can't do that level of destruction," he looked blandly at Thatcher. "That's why they kicked me out, right? Can't have a student like me trailing several million dollars of collateral damage around after him, can they?"

Vaguely aware that he was trembling like an adrenaline junky coming down off a recent high, he tried to appear as openly (sanely) curious as possible-- just a regular guy, nothing to see here, folks. Most everyone-- save for Mikaela-- seemed to be buying the act, no longer casting leery glances at him as though he would slump from his chair in a dead faint at any moment. But apparently Ratchet was more adept at judging human conditions that Sam had given him credit for. After throwing a hard look in the human's direction, he curled his fist around the camera in the cargo hold, blocking off the view, and proceeded to hiss an angry stream of static at Optimus. The Autobot commander ducked out of view for a moment, replying in the same series of whirls and clicks incomprehensible to the human ear. Though by no means fluent in dial tone, Sam was convinced that they were arguing. He hated the creeping suspicion that it was about him.

Thatcher regarded the pair of unoccupied screens for a moment as though debating whether or not to allow them time to finish, then turned to Sam.

"And how, precisely, would you know that you have been 'kicked out'?"

Suddenly, saying 'Because my girlfriend told me so' seemed like a stupid reason. He turned helplessly to Mikaela, who turned with a raised eyebrow to Galloway.

As Thatcher's attention followed their line of sight and zeroed in on the object of their scrutiny, the politician swallowed and tugged at his collar a bit.

"Technically, General, I had nothing to do with this. I merely answered Ms. Banes' questions. How she chose to interpret them is another matter entirely."

Mikaela gave a very un-lady-like snort. "Please. If you're going to lie, at least do it well," she turned to Thatcher, "I overheard him muttering about Sam while he was having a cup of coffee and reading through one of those files. When I asked him what he was talking about, he spilled the beans trying to defend himself before he even realized I hadn't heard the whole thing."

Galloway shrank from the cool stare Thatcher leveled in his direction. "I see..." the General muttered. Then, to everyone's surprise, he graced Sam with a tiny smile.

"Despite the poor opinions you may have of authority figures, son, we are not, in fact, a raving pack of monsters. You were not 'kicked out' because of the damage done to the library. The United States government requested that the Dean cancel your enrollment as a precaution to protect your safety as well as the safety of other students."

"Because it killed a bunch of people coming after me," he dead-panned.

No hesitation. "Yes."

The two distracted Autobots chose that moment to end their furious, though mostly silent, discussion, and the monitors once again filled with their alien visages.

Mikaela, suddenly furious once more, alternated between glaring at Thatcher and the reemerged Autobots.

"You guys are supposed to be super-advanced robots with IQ's of, like, 3000 or something! How can you go and do something so stupid like take Bumblebee away when the whole reason Sam can't go to college is that_ giant evil aliens are trying to kill him_!?

If Sam hadn't been closely following Thatcher's expression, he would have missed the slight frisson of tension that passed through his frame at her words and the quick, almost unnoticable glance he darted at Optimus. Alarm bells started ringing in his head-- what was going on?

The General hesitated, visibly scraping for words. "Steps are being taken to insure every survivor's safety," he evaded, "There are still a few issues being hammered out in the first draft of the treaty--"

"An issue which is neither here or now," Optimus cut across him abruptly, "As my medical officer has kindly informed me, time is growing short, General. Important as it is to tie up these loose ends, we need the chance to discuss our future battle plan with Captain Lennox and his team. If we could continue this another time...?"

Clearly upset at having been so effortlessly snubbed, Thatcher stiffly collected the grisly photographs and slipped them back into the file.

"Of course, Optimus Prime."

He closed the front flap of the folder-- the nausea-inudcing stills vanished from view, as if they had never existed.

* * *

Day one aboard the air craft carrier, stomachs cramping from voracious post-crisis hunger, Sam and Mikaela had turned the enormous vessel upside down looking for a vending machine. What they had uncovered instead was a fully stocked lounge that not only boasted of two ratty couches and a TV, but a mini kitchen as well, complete with sink, fridge, and microwave. Not quite as satisfying to sugar pangs as a package of M&M's and a Coke, but the presence of abundant sandwich materials had sufficed to turn them back into rational human beings. Every day since then they had returned when the food in the mess hall proved unpalatable, often cuddling together on the sofa afterwards to pop in a VHS into the ancient video player perched atop the TV.

Gliding trace-like down the hallway, Sam found his feet carrying him towards the familiar hideaway. Clenched tightly in his left hand, dimpled from the pressure of his fingers, he carried one of the packets of promise-not-to-tell forms. From experience dealing with the aftermath of Mission City, he already knew most of what was contained within and as such had not bothered to read a single word of it when the they started passing around pens and telling everyone to get started (SAT's from hell...giggle).

Mikaela had hissed at him over his shoulder, but that still had not stopped him from attacking each page with his pen in quick succession, putting himself down for all posterity under such pseudonyms as 'Matrix Boy', 'Mr. McWilly', and his personal favorite 'Lay D. Sman'.

Now, finally free from the torture room after a grueling seven hours, tired, hungry, and drained from emotional pinball, he decided to go make himself a sandwich. Not that he wanted a sandwich, but making one was the normal thing to do when hungry, and he much preferred the simple manual labor to running as fast as his feet would carry him to the cargo hold, throwing his arms around Bumblebee's leg and blubbering all over him.

Mikaela caught up to him in the hallway outside the longue.

"Hey, Sam!" She called. Ignoring the little voice that whispered to him to turn around, crush his girlfriend to his body and kiss her senseless, he continued along his shuffling course without acknowledging the greeting.

"I know you're not deaf, Sam. I already have one man-child in my family-- I don't need another."

A hand clamped down on his shoulder-- he spun, knocking it away, and ground out, "Look, Mikaela. I really don't want to do this now, so could we jus--"

Whatever he had been about to say forced itself back down his throat as soft, rose petal lips met his with wild passion, a pair of hands knotting in his hair and pulling him down into the kiss. The Book of Lies dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers as his arms slipped around her waste in response to her sudden ferocity. He yanked her firmly against him, clutching desperately at the warm body. He couldn't relax into the moment-- he started kissing every part of her he could reach, restlessly moving his lips from her mouth to the tip of her nose, to her eyelids, to her cheek, to the hollow of her throat, suddenly terrified that she would vanish into a puff of air the instant he let go (water everywhere-- can't breathe--).

"Wow, if I'd known you go all sex-crazy on me every time I act like a man-child I would have started doing it sooner," he mumbled against her skin. Suddenly realizing something, he gently tangled his fingers in her hair and pulled her head to him so he could kiss her ear. "Now when you said 'family', you mean...." he trailed off suggestively, kicking himself when she pulled away in response.

But rather than teasing, her face was hard and serious. Closed off.

"You need to talk to Bumblebee."

Reality-- better than a cold shower. No longer in the mood for kissing but not quite secure enough to let go, he gently guided her head back to the curve of his shoulder and felt her relax there, tension sliding from her shoulders.

"I know," he whispered against her hair, wishing his voice didn't sound so broken, so lost.

"What were you doing down here anyway?"

"Going to make myself a sandwich."

Resisting his efforts to hold her head to his chest, Mikaela craned her neck to look up at him.

"A sandwich."

"Uh-huh." Then, "I'm hungry."

Her beautiful face twisted into the picture of sorrow.

"Sam..." She trailed off, and he realized with shame that _she_ looked like she was trying to hold back tears, "You need to spend all the time with him you can before-- well, before you never have the chance to again."

"I know!" He realized he was shouting and struggled to lower his voice. "Don't you think I know that?" He gently, lovingly, placed his hands on either side of her face, "Don't you think I know that this is it, this is the end? After this it's 'Bye-bye, Bumblebee, have a nice life' and, 'Oh, next time you get the chance to come see me don't bother, I'll be dead and buried already, just leave some flowers on my headstone'!" He gazed into her eyes, struggling for words, hardly noticing as a lone drop of crystal moisture rolled slowly down his cheek. "I'm not...I'm not strong enough to do this, 'Kaela. I have to get used to him not being around. I'm not strong enough to say goodbye."

"Samuel James Witwicky," she murmured reverently, wiping away the tear with the tips of her fingers, "You are the strongest being, human or otherwise, I have ever met. So don't you dare try to get out of telling your friend you love him by saying you don't like goodbyes."

"You don't know what it's like!" He cried, crushing her to him again, holding her recklessly close as if invisible hands were trying to snatch her away, "You don't know what its like to suddenly realize you'll never see someone again, never talk to them again, never sit with them again."

Fiery images consumed his mind's eye, showing him a continuously looping tape of Optimus turning to face the descending horde of Decepticons. (--dancing the dance of death with all of them at once, so many (too many) against one and still he fought, still he sought to protect him, even as one move came too slow, one punch to late, and Megatron had him from behind, Megatron with his arm locked around his neck, driving his blade into his back and out through his chest, and still Optimus struggled, struggled against death, all for him, but it was too late and his optics flickered and died, flickered and died, blue life fading and leaving only gray--

"Yes, I do, Sam," her voice caressed him-- a velvet promise, a solemn prayer. She copied his posture, positioning her hands on either side of his head, carding her fingers through the sweaty hair over his temples. "I know what it's like to say goodbye. After all, I had to watch you die," she leaned up and kissed him under the jaw, "And if you know what's good for you, you won't dare do that to me again."

Sam's world inverted again, but this time it didn't send him tumbling into a bottomless sea. After all his ploys, after all his games and tricks to try to keep from saying those three little words, trying to keep the woman in his arms from moving on when she discovered he was too easy, Mikaela had finally told him that she loved him. Satisfied for the moment that he had secured a measure of affection from the girl he was absolutely crazy about, he had responded in kind. I love you. Three little words, libraries and oceans and universes of meaning. He had never doubted for a moment his own sincerity when he silently swore by all the myriad things those three little words implied, but until that moment it had never really dawned on him that _Mikaela_ had sworn to those unspoken things too. She didn't just say that she loved him-- she actually _loved him_. It was enough to lift the dark cloud around his heart, if only a little. He had something to go home to after all.

Just when he was thinking about kissing her again, a bright flash of light shattered the moment.

"Perfect pose, my man! Awww, you guys are so cute together!" Leo. Standing a few paced behind them, phone held up and at the ready to snap another picture, he grinned. "Two questions: 1) are you guys going to make out, and 2) can I join?"

Seeing the fierce glares both tried to light him on fire with, his leer faltered and he amended,

"Can you at least wait to start the action until I can go get my camcorder?"

Sam lifted Mikaela's hands and kissed their backs in a gentlemanly fashion. "Hold that thought. I have a geek to beat to a pulp. Be back soon!" He bent and retrieved his fallen booklet from the floor, handing it to her. Then, he turned to face the intruder.

"Dude!" Leo scurried away from him as he approached, but he still narrowed his eyes in a conspiratal manner and whispered, "You and me, we're in this together, Sam. We know the ways of _technology_--" he breathed the word with all the reverence of a fanatic, still backing away from him, "--Us techy bros have to stick together around the ladies. If you don't watch it, they will eat you aliiiiiiive."

"Well, then I guess Mikaela can have her fill of you after I trash your phone."

Sam lunged, but Leo anticipated the move and held the infuriating device just out of reach. He wiggled it back in forth in a taunting manner.

"You already trashed one of my phones! Besides, you might want to hold off on me and worry about yourself-- you forgot to pick up your blackberry when you dashed out of there like a wimp fleeing from a pack of jocks. Those guys? They are reeeaaalllllly serious about the security thing; they might destroy it if you don't go get it."

Sam froze in the middle of his assault, suddenly winded. His entire conversation with Bumblebee from that morning was still recorded on the blackberry. That someone might decide to read it did not scare him nearly half as much as the thought that if the blackberry were destroyed his last conversation with Bee would be forever lost. He couldn't risk that. He couldn't lose his last link to his best friend.

Abandoning his pursuit of Leo's phone, Sam leapt into a sprint back down the hallway, sandwich completely forgotten. At the last minute he called over his shoulder to Mikaela, assuring her that he would be right back.

Running at full tilt, it only took about ten minutes to make it back to level three. This time, however, they would not let him near the conference room, most likely because Lennox's team was still inside planning on how best to go about handling the surviving Decepticons. A few minutes of shouting at the guards about getting his phone back, however, did eventually result in the return of the requested article. Snatching it from the guard's hand, he turned his back and quickly scrolled through the recorded messages. He let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. It was still there. He would still be able to read it in the years to come and feel close to Bumblebee, even if the alien were a world away.

Pocketing the blackberry, he retraced his steps back down to the lounge at a much more leisurely pace. Both Mikaela and Leo were within, albeit occupying different corners of the room. Leo stood with his back to the cabinets in the kitchen area, fiddling with his phone and laughing. Sam suppressed a growl, closing his eyes and counting to ten. When he opened them, he had mellowed out enough to decide that he didn't care what the other boy did. Sticks and stones, and all that.

"Welcome back, Sam!" Leo greeted without looking up. "Your girlfriend dumped that rule book of yours in the sink."

Sam tried to smile at the sentiment, but couldn't quite remember how to do it. His eyes sought out the other occupant of the room.

Mikaela, he noticed with some interest, sat ramrod straight on the couch, so absorbed in the images flashing across the TV screen that she did not hear him enter.

"Kaela?"

Her head whipped around. When she saw him, her face closed down, expression becoming unreadable.

"I think you need to see this, Sam."

He came closer as she returned her attention to the TV. Rather than a soap opera, Judge Judy rerun or a cooking show, she was watching CNN. Lifting the remote, she thumbed up the volume.

_"....and authorities are still on the hunt for the illusive Samuel James Witwicky, shown here, reportedly missing for the last five days since disappearing from Princeton University after a deadly attack on the school claimed thirteen lives. So far, no one seems to know who, or indeed what, he may be, or why the creature calling itself 'The Fallen' so desperately wants to find him..."_

All the air left his lungs, and Sam found himself rooted in place, unable to move.

He had, naturally, known that practically everyone in the world had set off on a man hunt for him after the Decepticons held civilization itself for ransom and demanded him as the price. But after being caught up in the battle in Egypt and having seen the power of the Fallen utterly destroyed, some part of his mind had assumed that everything would just go back to the way it was and no one would give a hoot about him anymore. Obviously, he had been wrong. Dead wrong.

"Woah, what's going on over here?"

Leo, catching onto the tail end of the news broadcast, wandered over to stand beside him. Seeing Sam's flickering picture thrown up on the screen, he paled, eye widening.

"_Shit_," he whispered emphatically.

_"...just last night, we received word from our on-sight reporter in the middle east that one of the great pyramids of Giza has been torn down, supposedly the work of the giant machines seen three days ago in every major city all around the world. No live footage of the destruction has become available, however, due to a fifty mile wide perimeter around the sight preventing anyone from entering. The Egyptian government has also been refusing to allow any news helicopters access to air space over the sight, and it is rumored that F-22 fighter jets have been stationed all around the no-fly zone to shoot down anyone attempting to enter..."_

"That's not all," Mikaela warned them through trembling lips. She flipped the BBC, a British news station.

_"....no leads on Samuel James Witwicky, as seen in this snap-shot, have yet come to light, but the hunt is still on to track him down as quickly as possible..."_

Next she changed it to a spanish station. Though Sam could not understand the words the swarthy reporter bleated into his microphone, english captioning made it possible to follow along with what was being said. It was hardly a mystery what they heralded as the top story, though-- here, as with the other two, his picture remained a constant feature in a little box in the upper right hand corner.

_"...some speculate that these creatures are not part of a terrorist plot at all, but are rather visitors from another world. Though their reasons for wanting this boy, Samuel James Witwicky, are unknown, many within the population are calling for his immediate apprehension to try to prevent wide spread destruction as threatened in this message--"_

A sandwich. Just a normal sandwich. He wanted a sandwich, needed a sandwich, so he was going to make himself a sandwich. Leaving an enraptured Leo standing hypnotized by the alerts flashing continuously across the screen, Sam turned deliberately away and went to the kitchen area, fumbling open cabinets to dig out sandwich supplies.

*Click*

An arabic channel, with a voice-over in english.

_"--fear is at an all time high. No one knows what these creatures are and if, or when, they will return. Our egyptian brothers are still refusing to allow anyone a glimpse of the ruins of one of the great pyramids. Some speculate that its destruction is merely a demonstration, an expression of displeasure with how long it is taking to locate Samuel J--"_

A plate first. Then bread, two slices of wheat. Shaking fingers pulled open a drawer, pulled out a knife, dropped it. Picked it up, dropped it again. Get out another knife, set it on the counter. Open a cabinet-- peanut butter, ketchup, mustard. Sandwich, sandwich, sandwich. _('Bumblebeee!')_

*Click*

Chinese this time. Continuous scrolling announcements at the bottom of the screen.

_"--disappeared from Princeton University in the United States. Large contingents of soldiers, local police and volunteers have begun organizing to start combing China for the wanted boy. But so far, no one seems to have any idea where S--"_

Yank open the refrigerator; jelly, onions, lettuce, tomato, cheese, ham, roast beef. Pickles. Keep it normal, keep it sane. Just a sandwich, Sam. Just a normal sandwich. (no air, nowhere to go-- can't _breathe_--)

*Click*

A dark African man, skin almost black, standing in front of a peeling background. Something that sounded like Portuguese.

_"--mass outbreaks of sectarian violence among christians and muslims in the north, each claiming that the arrival of these otherworldly visitors is a punishment for the other's sins. The only thing anyone can agree on at this point is the need to find Samuel Witwicky before any more atrocities on the scale of the recent happenings in Egypt can occur--"_

Can't remember which end of the knife to use, get out a spoon. Scoop out a large glob of peanut butter, slather it on the bread. Onions next, then jelly, and a few slices of meat. Squirt ketchup in a spoon, try to smear it on the other piece of bread, rip a hole in it. Oh well. Mash it back together again. It's only bread. You can tear it to pieces and always mash it back together again later. Tear and mash, tear and mash. (How do you expect the bread to survive having so many holes?)

*Click*

_"--no word yet on exactly what has occurred to the pyramids in Egypt or where the mysterious Samu--"_

More meat. Cheese, lettuce, tomatoes. Crush the two pieces of bread together and mount the completed work on a plate. (throw knives and spoon into the sink with the worthless book of papers, book of lies)

*Click*

_"--question on everyone's lips is where is Samuel Wit--"_

*Click*

_"--suggested that now is the time when the needs of the many outweight the needs of the f--"_

*Click*

_"--hunt continues for S--"_

*Click*

_"--..'Deliver to me this boy'...--"_

"Hey...Sam?"

At the sound of Leo's voice, Sam wheeled around and threw the plate and its captive sandwich as hard as he could into the wall. Condiments splattered everywhere with a dull thud, painting the white wallpaper red and brown and purple and yellow. Without any means of support, the plate fell to the floor with a sharp crack of struck ceramic, though it did not break. For a moment the sandwich hung suspended by its own stickiness on the wall. But as they watched-- one gaze empty, one startled, and one flat out terrified-- it languidly slid to the floor beside the plate, leaving a trail of technicolor ooze.

Leo gaped for a little bit, then rasped, "That only missed me by about three inches," his eyes slipped to Mikaela, who had risen from the couch in shock at the sudden commotion. "Your boyfriend just tried to kill me!" He squeaked at her.

"Then I guess it's a good thing he missed," she retorted, starting forward, "...Sam?"

"Give me a minute. Please."

All the coiling, sparking energy had rushed out of him the moment he threw the plate, leaving him feeling curiously drained and empty. Empty was good. He didn't feel happy or sad or frustrated or terrified or one of the many un-nameable things he had felt in the past 24 hours. Instead he felt suddenly calm. Rational. Reasonable.

Straightening up, he went to the sink and turned on the water, not bothering to remove the non-disclosure agreements fouling up the basin. Then, he washed his hands.

"Okay," he nodded to himself, switching the water back off and drying his hands. "Okay."

He turned, finding Leo still gaping at him, phone clutched between his hands. The coil in his chest wound a little tighter at the sight, but he didn't think that he was in danger of it breaking free again.

"What did you want to tell me? You know, before I took a break from reality and had a spaz moment."

Pressing his eyes closed and shaking his head as if to clear it, Leo forced a toothy smile back onto his face and jogged the last few steps to come stand beside him. If Sam had been in a mood to care, it could have stirred a little pity in him seeing the other boy having to try so hard to maintain his carefree playboy mask (the mask of the warrior, not really a mask at all-- which is real, the Bee or the Hornet?).

"Just this," he turned on the phone and called up a web page through his WiFi internet access. "I saw how you went nutso over me taking a video of you-- seriously bro? the nutso thing is not cool-- so I decided to make it up to you by putting together this little piece of hotness. Check it out!"

The way he had earlier that morning, Leo started the video. It resembled nothing so much as a crudely realized photoshop monster-- the clip started with a cropped picture of Mikaela leaning amorously against a stick figure representation of Galloway with a sign pointed at his head that read 'A-Hole'. The stick figure leaned in to french her, and then the scene changed to the video from breakfast of Sam attacking Galloway, this time with the little scrawled caption beneath it reading, 'Don't you touch my girl friend, bitch!!!". The miniature epic summed up with the completed picture of Sam and Mikaela together surrounded by little hearts and topped by the words 'THE END...?'

Okay, so Sam had to cut the guy a break. He was trying.

"Thanks. That's, uh....some spectacular drawing you've got going there."

"Yeah, I know, right? Just wait until this thing becomes the number one hit on YouTube!"

Simultaneously, Sam and Mikaela froze into twin blocks of granite.

"...Youtube?" Sam breathed, hoping against hope his ex-roommate wasn't that hopelessly stupid. "You're going to post this on YouTube?"

Not catching the dangerous undercurrent to his voice, Leo scrolled up to the top of the page and gestured to the familiar logo. "Already done!"

"...You _IDIOT_!"

With a feral strength he hadn't realized he possessed, Sam snatched the phone from Leo and hurriedly removed the incriminating video from the internet movie sight. He feared that the damage had already been done, however.

"What IS IT with you, dude?" Leo cried, wrestling his phone back, "That was my best post yet!"

And the spring inside of him snapped. Sam pushed the other boy up against the counter, grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling them nose to nose.

"Were you dead for the last ten minutes, or did you truly miss the fact that everyone, EVERYONE in the world is currently hunting for me?" Calm. Even. Deadly.

Understanding dawned in his eyes. "Oops."

Wild-eyed, snorting with slow, measured breaths through his nose, Sam slammed him up against the counter one more time for good measure and then let go, retreating back a few steps to avoid giving into the temptation to do far worse.

Straightening up and rubbing the small of his back, Leo glanced to Mikaela for support. She folded her arms over her chest, lips thinned to a pencil line.

"Look, how should I have known that--"

The phone rang in his hand. He jumped, fumbling with it as though it had suddenly turned into a live snake. After many tries and endless repetitions of "Miss American Pie" he managed to flip it open and bring it to his ear.

"Joe's pool hall, eight ball speaking. How may I help you?"

The response was so loud he yelped and held the phone at arm's length, distrusting gaze giving the impression that he thought it _was_ a snake in disguise and might actually bite him. In fact, the response was so loud even Sam could hear it clearly.

"YO, CHIA PET! GIVE THE PHONE TO DOUBLE-OH-ZERO OVER THERE ON YA LEFT!"

Sam would have recognized that voice anywhere. Mudflap.

"What?" Leo yelled towards the phone, helplessly befuddled.

"WHAT, YOU DEAF O SOMETHIN'?" Skids. "GIVE. THE. PHONE. TO MISTA SECRET AGENT MAN!'

"W-what, you mean 007? As in James Bond?"

"BOY, YOU REALLY IS STUPID, AIN'T YOU? NOT DOUBLE-OH-SEVEN, DOUBLE-OH-ZERO, AS IN STUMBLEBEE'S PET!'

"Sam? You mean Sam?"

"UH, DUH."

Leo slid a glance at Sam.

"He's not here. You got the wrong number! I'm Leo McCool."

"NO, YOUSE LEO MCSTUPID! HE'S STANDIN RIGHT NEXT TA YO SORRY ASS! NOW PASS OVER THE FRAGGIN PHONE!"

Leo paled, whirling around as if to discover the Twins hiding under a table or stuffed in the freezer. "How can you see us?"

Sam, looking around at the same time, discovered the answer to the riddle in the form of a camera in one corner of the ceiling. A single red light glowed down at them like a malevolent eye. "Up there."

"DOUBLE-OH-ZERO SHOOTS AND SCORES!"

Leo followed Sam's gaze and almost dropped the phone. The camera slowly rotated to face them, pinning them with its red eye.

"SAY HELLO TO THE CAMERA, BITCHES!"

Faster than he would have thought humanly possible, Leo all but chucked the phone at Sam. Fearing a continuation of the boisterous shouting, he held it a little away from his ear until a tiny, whispering voice crooned, "Let's talk all secret like, Sam-mah-man."

Shrugging at Mikaela when she mimed asking what was going on, he touched the speaker to his ear.

"Mudflap? Skids? What's going on?"

"Shh. Not there. We got a big old surprise for ya, but ya can't go talking about it with the hotty and chia pet hangin around."

Sam felt his ire rising again and forcefully beat it down. "Her name is Mikaela, not hotty."

"Woah, cheeel double-oh-zero, no need to pop a cap on us. Micky it is for miss hotty."

Resigning himself to the inevitable bestowing of nicknames, Sam pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Guys, if this is some kind of a game, now is really not a good time."

"This ain't a game, man. This is serious business! We got somethin we gotta show ya, but you have to ditch Micky and Leo McStupid first."

Sam hesitated, first and foremost because he didn't trust the twins to be 'serious' any more than he trusted that Megatron was really just a misguided do-gooder. And not that he particularly relished Leo's company, but he enjoyed any time spent with Mikaela. And he really, REALLY did not want to venture down into the cargo hold where he was sure to run into Bumblebee.

Sensing his hesitation, they replied, "Ya don't have to go far. We're waiting to meet you in the stair well between levels uno and dos. But ya gotta hurry, or you'll miss all the action!"

Sam looked to Mikaela, torn.

The twins sweetened the deal. "Da bosses been hiding stuff from you, double-oh-zero. You really gonna take that lyin down?"

Remembering vividly Thatcher's meaningful pauses and the obvious tension between him and Optimus, Sam realized it wasn't really much of a choice at all.

"What do I need to do?"

* * *

....Oh wow. This is long. And somehow, I'm STILL not finished with this blasted chapter! (*puts up a sign that says part two of three*)

In any case, this story has me bitten with rabid plot bunnies. 0_o Right now, I really don't see how I'll be able to stop. This is getting bad for my health, though-- this is the third (fourth?) time in a row I've been up till 3 am working on this baby. Seriously-- _bitten_.

Trust me when I say that this is NOT just one big beat-up-on-Sam story. There is a REASON all these seemingly bad things are happening to him, the whole picture just hasn't been revealed yet. When it is, I think you'll like it. And someone, please tell me how I'm doing on my Sam/ Mikaela romance. I didn't like them as a couple in the movie, but now that I'm getting into the groove of things I can see why they should have been good together in the movie (*scratches head*).

And as always, please review! I won't know whether or not you like my story if you don't review!!


	6. Spy Games

War, as seen through the eyes of history, is the most powerful agent of change, greater at toppling nations and sparking revolutions than any natural disaster or slow economic decline. After only a few short years in Vietnam, the American populice did an abrupt 180 in their views of life in general and war in particular, warping from a nation rallying behind its troops in a way reminiscent of WWII to condemning soldiers as baby killers and throwing flowers at politicians.

But the natives of Cybertron had not been fighting for only seven, or fifty, or one hundred years. Ever since the Great Betrayal over four million years earlier, a slim margin of the population labeling themselves 'Autobots' had fought against the tyranny of the warrior caste who had abused their power to assume absolute control, the Decepticons. For four million years, an entire species had been at war-- the equivalent of 571,428 consecutive Vietnam wars. Needless to say, more than the structure of nations had changed as a result. The Cybertronians themselves, in a desperate bid to survive, changed their very bodies as well, altering themselves until they could blend seamlessly with their environment and thus raise their chances of living for another thousand years or so.

This adaptability, however, was not limited to the physical form. With every new lifeform they encountered, the Cybertronians set out immediately to not only find suitable disguises, but also to download and assimilate as much of the native culture as possible. Arriving on earth, most of the Autobots (and a handful of the Decepticons) had skillfully sorted through the multitudes of different cultures, dialects, and customs to find those most likely to give them an advantage when dealing with humans. And so all learned to speak english, almost all (except for Arcee) adopted male personas, and most acted in a similiar manner to a well-balanced, middle-class white American. Most, that is, except for three quirky outliers-- Jazz, Mudflap and Skids.

Darting secretively down the hallways, cell phone pressed tightly to his ear, Sam knew-- intellectually-- that the twins were merely engaging in a carefully planned act. Yet no matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine either one saying 'indubitably' with a straight face. If it was an act, it was certainly one they enjoyed.

_"Yo! Get yo butt in gear, man! Frozen dog shit could move faster than that!"_

_"Gonna have ta have to bust youse down to double-owe-_negative-one _if you don't make like a faucet and run!"_

"I'm going as fast as I can!" Sam skidded around the next corner, plowing through the red fire door he had been instructed to find without slowing down. "Couldn't you have picked some place closer?!"

"Could've hacked our legs off too, but then ya wouldn't get to play secret agent with the twins!"

Emerging onto the narrow landing of a stairwell, Sam was forced to skid to a stop and grab onto the railing at the shock of hearing Mudflap's voice both over the phone and echoing from the metal walls. Lowering the phone to his shoulder, he leaned his upper body over the rail and looked up at the endless stairs leading to the floors above.

"Psst! Double-owe-zero! Down here."

Following Mudflap's broad urban accent, Sam found the Autobots twins one floor beneath him. The sight of them crammed into the narrow space, stuck almost on top of one another-- bumping the walls and themselves with a jumble of elbows, knees, hands and feet-- made him sputter, inexplicably amused. He was still freaked, wigged out, losing it, but now he was freaked, wigged out, losing it AND entertained.

"Thanks for the support," Skids, partially smushed beneath Mudflap, sulked at his snicker.

Sam flipped the phone shut with his chin and started down the stairs, taking two or three steps at a time. "I aim to please," he panted.

Stopping just short of the tangled mass of robotic limbs, he bent over and planted his hands on his knees, huffing from the strenuous sprint he had undertaken from the lounge to the back stairwell that seemed (to Sam) a mile away from anything at all. During the last two minutes of his run he had not encountered a single person, and even the walls themselves seemed to breathe a neglected air. Though he could have taken a few breaks, or even contained himself to a jog, he had chosen instead to bolt down the hallways for all he was worth, slowing only long enough to be sure he wasn't about to bowl someone over. Any spare second of unoccupied time, even if it was a second spent pausing for breath, was a second in which his mind started to gibber with stark terror and crushing despair (not coming back not coming back, Bee help me!).

"How did you guys manage to fit in here anyway?" he asked between breaths. He didn't really care about the answer, not exactly, but it was something to focus his mind on.

"Ain't you figured it out yet? We got talent fallin off us like spare parts!" Mudflap struggled forward, trying to disentangle himself from his brother. He ended up kicking Skids in the face in the process.

"Yow! Watch it, ya stumble-footed after-burner!"

A green fist lashed out and caught Mudflap in the side, doing no real damage but connecting with a resounding CLANG that rattled Sam's teeth.

"Youse the one blockin up the whole place with yo aft, slagger! That thing bigger than Screamer's ego!" Mudflap retaliated, twisting his brother's arm behind his back and getting him in a head lock. Even more entangled that before, the noisily stuggling pair stumbled into a wall, causing the whole stairwell to rumble.

If they had been human (or if he had been Bumblebee) he would have rushed into the fight, prized them apart, and knocked their heads together. But ten feet shorter and several tons lighter than the yellow scout, Sam settled for pin wheeling his arms and shouted, "Will you two knock it off?! You're making a racket! Everyone's going to know we're here!"

Still crushed in a head lock, Skids piped up, "Secret agent man got a point."

Mudflap smacked the back of his head but grudging released the entraped arm from his grip. "Suck up."

"Bitch."

"Toad face."

"Aft-kisser."

Only space-faring alien robots, Sam reflected with something like awe, could make an exchange of insults sound like terms of endearment. Restored to the spirit of the misson, the Las Vegas Christmas-colored robots moved with relative swiftness and grace to extricate their respective body parts with a minimum of noise. Their hunched frames still filled the corridor, giving it the feeling of being no more than a rat's hole, but no longer did they appear to be contestants in a Twister tournament.

"Alright. Well, I'm here, obviously," he spread his arms to emphasize the fact, "So what's this 'surprise' you guys were talking about? What's going on with Optimus and Thatcher?" His lips quirked, though this time there was no humor in the expression, "Are they dating, or something? Please tell me they're not dating."

"Eeew..." They shuddered in unison. "Ya fried my processer, man!" Skids lamented at the same time that Mudkip muttered, "Did NOT want that image in mah head."

"So then why did you have me rush down here? And if you say 'Sike', I'm going to sic Bumblebee on you," He paused, "No, scratch that. I'll sic _Mikaela _on you."

"Micky," Mudflap scoffed, "What's the hotty think she gonna do? She don't stand a chance against da _mastas_!"

The twin robots cackled and bumped their fists together.

Sam let an eery, flat smile spread across his face. "Let's just say she can be _very_ creative with a welding torch."

They froze, then started verbally backpedaling. "Naw, naw! This ain't no joke!" "Serious business here, double-owe-zero."

"And that's another thing-- why did you nick-name me after James Bond?"

Mudflap leaned towards him conspiritally, bringing his wide head so close to Sam's that he could track the minute whirling of the lens-like rings that made up his optics.

"You, me, an him? We got some _spyin_ to do," he said lowly.

Sam's heart started to knock loudly against his ribs, his throat drying to a desert-like consistency.

"You mean that meeting they're having now, right? You want us to eavesdrop on a Optimus and Thatcher while they're talking to Lennox's team?"

"Them?" Skids snorted, "Who'd want to spy on those dried up sticks? Nah, we got somethin much jucier to show you, somethin no one's supposed to know about, 'cept we caught 'em arguing 'bout it."

Mudflap pulled back, straightening up as much as was possible in the confined space.

"See, right 'bout now that meetin should be lettin out-- that's the end of the legit part of all this mess. The stuff some o dem gonna talk 'bout all secret-like after? Not so much."

Sam looked between them dubiously. "And you're going to help me spy on your leader."

"No _duh_. For offin Megatron, you really ain't too bright."

Mentally shaking himself like a dog shedding water, he ignored the insult and replied, "Cool. Awesome. Nifty. Let's do it."

It was nothing if not fascinating watching the twins attempting to pose as tour guides. Their size limited them to a very circuitous route through the ship, most of the time traveling through stairwells and corridors where the space between the walls was greater to allow the passage of large equipment. Adopting the graceful, fluid stride common to the alien visitors, Mudflap and Skids were able to lope along too fast for Sam to keep up. At such times-- and when they lithely dropped down between floors without bothering to use the stairs-- one of the other of the pair would snatch him up and carry him along. The gentleness of their hands set a strange counterpoint to the brusqueness of their manner; he never felt even the faintest bite of pain.

The observation of their careful handling lead to another, more unnerving observation-- both Mudflap and Skids were strangely possesive. Not in the way that Bumblebee was possesive-- Bumblebee, who had a habit of appointing himself not only Sam's guardian but his potential-friend screener as well, acted possesive the way a...well, the way a lonely alien would snatch up his friend and hiss at anyone else who tried to come near (my friend, my ally, my-- my--). The twins, on the other hand, regarded him as a cross between co-conspirator, amusing thing, and pet.

When at last Mudflap, who had assumed the position of unofficial leader, brought them to a halt in the middle of a corridor facing nothing but a blank wall, Sam was thoroughly sick of being passed around. Smoothing his transformer-wrinkled shirt, he threw a glance around them and said, "Now what?"

"Watch and learn, Padawan!" Skids reached up and touched a boring stretch of metal ceiling, moving his fingers as though tracing an invisible pattern. Just about to suggest that maybe he had a few loose screws rattling around in his head somewhere, Sam gaped as the tips of his fingers transformed into flat-edged tools resembling spackle knives-- which he then effortlessly inserted around the edges of a nearly invisible metal panel. Jiggling the revealed plating loose from its moorings, he pushed it up into the crawl space above and slid it aside.

"All right! Now we're gettin somewhere!" Mudflap enthused, using his brother as a strangely shaped ladder to vault into the enormous duct.

"Pit-spawned slagger! Watch where yo puttin yo feet!"

As the inevitable hand came toward him, Sam submitted docilely to being set into the crook of Skids' arm like an life-sized doll. Tucking the human down against his armor, the neon green transformer leapt after his brother. One inside the shaft, he nudged the panel back into place with his foot. Utter blackness, like the dark of night inside a cave, descended with moth wings over Sam's eyes, and a rush of gratefulness that he _had_ been picked up flooded him. He would never have been able to follow them unaided in the pitch black.

From somewhere to their left Mudflap hissed, "Come on, rust bucket! We ain't go no more time to fool around!"

And Skids started forward into the darkness. For a moment Sam was gripped with panic, heart leaping into his throat at the thought that the robot carrying him-- the _several ton _robot carrying him-- was wandering around blind and might, at any moment, fall through the ceiling beneath them (ceiling below, floor above, everything is upsidedown/downsideup).

"If you can't see where you're going, I don't want to know," he whispered to his handler. Out of nowhere, something that felt suspiciously like an enormous finger poked him in the back of the head.

"Say, 'infrared scanning' with me, home boy."

"Oh. Okay, now I feel stupid."

Poke, harder this time. "You IS stupid if you can't do somethin this simple. Say 'infrared scanning'!"

Folding his arms over his chest and scowling crossly into the dark, he repeated, "Infrared scanning," and felt like a trained parrot. Ugh.

To his astonishment and humiliation, Skids actually giggled. "Ooo, Freaky. Say it again."

Instead, Sam made a rude gesture in the dark, knowing that the robot could see it with his 'infrared scanning'.

"Now _that_ is just plain mean."

"Shut up!" Mudflap whispered furiously. Sam jumped-- the other robot could not have been more than five feet away. "Youse _both_ idiots! Gabberin like a bunch of femmes-- we gotta be slick o Prime'll drop-kick both our afts an nail 'em to the wall!"

At this point the vent must have constricted-- Sam felt Skids hunch over him as he ducked to squeeze himself through. They continued that way, shuffling awkwardly forward in silence, until Sam glimpsed a spot of not-darkness up ahead.

Something made a clicking noise in the dark, then whirled and whined like a dog whistle ascending in ptich-- and suddenly a faint blue light illuminated Mudflap's silhouette. Since the robot's back was toward Sam, he could not see what sort of device he held that gave off the light. The redish robot signaled with a waved hand to his Sam's lumpy transportation, and Skids scuttled forward, stopping short of the spot of not-darkness. Closer now, Sam recognized it as a slotted grate similar to the kind found at base-board level in homes, though this one was the size of a sewer grate.

Silently, moving with more care than seemed possible for a creature of such size, Mudflap set down the device in his arms beside the grate. To Sam's punch-drunk mind, it somewhat resembled those tapering wooden towers given to babies and used to hold stacks of rings of various sizes and colors. He tapped the device, gave it a sharp twist, and the blue light flared momentarily before settling back into a steady glow.

"Alright, you can unstick yo lips now, Skids."

But it was Sam, struggling slightly to be let down, who spoke first.

"What is that thing?"

"Dis baby here? Only da best sensor nullifier dis side of da Milky Way."

Skids set him on his feet, and Sam cautiously approached the large grate and the device sitting quietly beside it, vaguely fearful that it would suddenly go Ka-BOOM.

When no more information seemed forthcoming, he prompted, "And a sensor nullifier would be....?"

"Means no bot will be able to pick us up on his scanners. 'Less a course he know's we're here and he comes looking for us, in which case we're screwed," Skids answered, crouching down beside him. The three formed a loose semi-circle around the grate. Opening his mouth to ask what they needed a sensor nullifier for, Sam looked down through the grating and answered his own question. Somehow, they had ended up in a vent overlooking a hidden corner of the cargo bay. Fifty feet beneath them sat Optimus in truck mode, neither moving nor speaking nor doing anything mildly note-worthy.

Somehow he knew, without being told, that they were waiting for someone else to arrive.

"And you're sure he doesn't know we're here? He's not like, you know, snickering at us and waiting until our backs are turned to jump up and cut the floor out from under us with that glowing sword of his?"

Skids waved him off. "Not a chance, double-oh-zero. We's slick as black ice-- ain't no one knows where we at."

"I hope you're right," Sam muttered to himself under his breath.

"Oo! Dis side give ya the best shot of the action-- get over here!" Interjected Mudflap excitedly.

The red robot reached for him. Sam could not help the animal reflex that screamed Dark! and Wantstoeatme! that caused him to flinch away slightly. But before the orangy-red appendage could pick him up, two hands closed around his rib cage from behind and lifted him up and away. Skid held him at arms length away from Mudflap, using a foot to the face to hold the other Autobot at bay as he attempted to lunge across the grating.

"My human! Go find ya own!" And skids made a noise very similiar to a defiant raspberrry.

Torn between fuming in outrage and slapping a hand over his face in exasperation, Sam glanced back down through the grating to check on Optimus (just in case)-- and saw Thatcher rapidly approaching the disguised alien leader.

"Enough!" He snapped, pointing down at the scene far below when both twins looked at him in confusion. Abadoning their fight as though it had never taken place, Skids and Mudflap straightened up and leapt lithely back to their places, Skids taking the time to set Sam back beside the grate from where he had snatched him.

Holding his breath, Sam leaned forward to peer through the slatted bars, feeling the two aliens do the same on either side of him.

Looking as stiffly enraged as a man can look when viewed from above, Thatcher stalked towards the parked Peterbilt. His polished shoes tapped out a staccato rythm on the metal planking. Surprisingly enough, he came sans briefcase or clipboard (or a helper bearing the two items), carrying with him only an air of crackling frustration tinted with a kind of helpless resignation. It was like watching a kid jump into a boxing ring with the heavy weight camp-- the kid knew he was going to lose, and that fact frustrated him all the more, fueling his defiance. The feeling was a familiar one to Sam. (No where to run, no where to hide, a metal demon stalking towards him-- give me the cube, boy!)

"You are the most stubborn jackass I have ever met," Thatcher stated with authority to the silent truck.

Sam choked on air; Skids pounded him on the back.

In any other scenario, telling a driver-less truck that it was a jackass would be ample reason to stick the name-caller in the looney bin on suspicion of drunkeness. But the incident unfolding in the cargo bay was not any other scenario-- the truck, despite appearences, was not inanimate, and Thatcher was as stone cold sober as a priest on Sunday.

The highly decorated General stopped ten feet from Optimus' front bumper, clasping his hands behind his back. As serene as ever, Optimus did not rise to the taunt.

"Some would consider that a compliment, General."

"But you know damn well it isn't, so I say again: You are one stubborn SOB," He grunted, "I'll have you know you've gotten Washington stirred up like a nest of angry hornets over this. I had to turn off my phone so I wouldn't have to hear a million repetitions of the same old questions."

To Sam's surprise, Optimus rumbled in a way that could have been a laugh.

"I have full confidence in your ability to handle it."

"Yeah, well _I_ don't," Thatcher refuted. He ran a hand through his hair, just as if he were a little bit nervous, "I don't have the authority to do what you're asking-- Hell, I don't have the political pull to even get one foot in the door with this!"

"But it must be done, General," Optimus' voice, though soft, held a steely note of resolution. Determination. Like granite. "And it must be done soon, before we dock in India. I have no desire to cause an international incident by being charged with kidnapping."

Sam's heart missed a beat, stuttered, and picked up in double time, thudding so quickly that it hurt. He leaned down until his forehead rested on the grating, hooking his fingers around the slats. (Breathe, remember to breathe)

"Which is why I had to ask the slimey bastard for his help, as much as I might wish to throw him over the side. He has the connections and the know-how you need if you're so damned determined to do this thing.

"I am," Optimus affirmed, then hesitated. "Although the fact that he has demonstrated considerable animostiy towards us in the past seems to indicate that he would be unwilling to help us now."

"Us? What 'us'? This is your problem, Prime-- your quest, your shitstorm."

There was a long pause, then; "You are not as hard-hearted as you would like me to believe."

Thatcher swore vehemently, using vocabulary so colorful that he must have been a sailor earlier in life.

"Look, I'm not saying I agree with you or what you're doing....but in the interests of diplomacy, I know a few marines that are good at keeping their mouths shut if I need to dangle him over the side as presuasion."

"I thank you," Optimus answered the unspoken affirmation of support.

_"What on God's green earth are you up to now, Prime?"_ An angry voice called from somewhere out of sight, swiftly growing in volume to accompany the approaching rat-a-tat of another pair of shoes. Sam recognized the second man by his voice long before he strutted into view-- Galloway. Unlike Thatcher, Galloway carried a bulging briefcase in one hand and a wad of files in the other, files which he was currently involved in waving angrily through the air. "General Thatcher, I insist that this- this _parody _of a joke be terminated immediately!"

Posture radiating a distinct coldness, Thatcher turned from Optimus to observe the advancing Galloway, nonplused by his theatrical gesturing.

"I assure you, sir, that this is not a joke."

Sam blinked at the use of the respectful term, then remembered from sophmore politics class that all army hierarchy was technically subservient to the civilian government. Thatcher wasn't brown-nosing-- he was showing the minimum respect required.

Galloway motioned violently towards Optimus, not even having the decency to face him-- as if he were not there, or as if he were unworthy of being faced.

"Really? Then how about a _psychotic delusion_? He just came back from the dead-- how do we know he didn't lose a few circuits in the process?"

For an instant, Sam wished more than anything else that Jetfire was there to teleport him to the floor of the cargo bay so that he could beat the bastard senseless.

"If you wish," Optimus interrupted, "My medic can provide you with a detailed report on my physical and mental state-- though I am sure you would find that the only thing I am lacking is time to rest."

"One robot insisting that another robot isn't crazy," Galloway mocked in an airy tone, throwing up his hands, "Because of course that is an _objective_ way of proving relative sanity."

Thatcher, hands still clenched tightly behind his back, stepped up into Galloway's personal space and glared down at the smaller man.

"How about," he copied the other man's mocking lilt, "You do the right thing for once in your miserable life and either help us or resign so that someone else can?"

"You cannot force me to resign," Galloway responded stiffly. Thatcher gaced him with a distinctly predatory smile.

"Of course not. You'll simply be fired when it comes to light that you cannot act without extreme bias towards the very _people_ we are trying so very hard not to piss off."

Galloway stiffened. "The President--"

"The President may just get down on his knees and lick Prime's feet in gratitude. Or hadn't you heard that it's no longer fashionable to try to undermine human-Autobot relations?"

Galloway glanced from Thatcher to Optimus and back again, face more pallid than alabaster.

"Very well," he finally said. Stiff. Faint. "I'll make a few calls. See what I can do."

He jumped when Optimus spoke; "Whatever needs to be done must be done by tomorrow night. I cannot delay telling him any longer."

As though struck by a bolt of lightning, Sam jerked backwards from the grate, scrambling away from the sight of Optimus, Thatcher and Galloway fighting over something about _him_. Logic whispered that Optimus did not seem to be plotting to harm him, yet instinctual fear washed over him in wave after wave of terror that they were planning on turning him in, arresting him like some wanted criminal (_'--still hunting for the illusive Samuel James Witwicky--'_) and turning him over to the mercy of the masses-- or the mercy of the Decepticons (--Megatron, starcream-- slashing claws, fangs snapping together near his cheek-- _'I'll let you be my pet'_--).

Sinking through water, sinking through air (can't breathe), he flailed away on his hands and knees-- an accidently kicked over the sensor nullifier. The machine whirled, clicked, and the blue light went out. Their web of protection vanished. Almost at once, the sound of a lightning fast transformation echoed from below and Optimus cried to the two humans, "Run!"

"Shit! Shit! Shit!" The twins were screaming, scampering away, and Sam was left flailing like a fish. A powerful electric whine of a cannon charging up, and with an almighty shriek of tearing, burning metal a searing bolt of blue energy ripped through the vent beside him, missing incinerating him by scant centimeters. The concussive force of the blast lifted him up and slammed him into the side of the vent-- he cried out as he felt something in his arm give way with a sickening snap. Then he was falling, slipping through the hole in the vent and plummeting towards the concrete floor fifty feet below.

Before he even had time to feel fear of splattering into a pile of human goo, a familiar yellow hand snatched him out of the air-- and slammed him up against a metal crate, fingers curling around him in a cage of claws. Sam stared in horror at the cruel lines of Bumblebee's battle mask, the mask that turned the friendly Bee into the Hornet (my ally, my friend, my--), as his guardian angel in robotic form pulled back his cannon and began to charge it for a second blast.

Terror-- stark, pants-wetting terror-- often comes without a sound, without even a scream. It was all happening so fast, too fast, and he had not yet had time to process what was going on around him. But as he stared down the humming barrel of Bumblebee's ion cannon, terror overcame him, and though he uttered not a sound, on the inside he began to scream (Bee--Bee--_Bumblebee, no!!_)

The moment stretched and held-- a sliver of time frozen into crystal, trapped in amber. Slowly, so slowly, his identity began to dawn on the yellow robot, and the glow deep in the pit of Bee's cannon faded away. The harsh pressure of Bumblebee's hand around him retreated, becoming a gentle hold rather than a restraining grip.

_"...Sam?"_ The yellow scout whispered, only Bee once more.

"Um..." he shuddered out, "...is this a bad time?"

Before he could blink, the Autobot pulled him into his arms. The motion wasn't a hug, not really. Too many metal lumps and hard angles to make a Bee snuggle-bear. But he found himself craddled by the giant robot, held with infinite gentleness as Bee crouched to the floor and drew him in against him, curling his body around the vulnerable, fragile human as if to make himself a living shield.

"Sam..." Bee murmured again, voice rough, broken, trembling.

"Um, Bee?" He grated, his own voice wavering so hard that he doubted anyone but his robot guardian could understand him. "My arm, I think it's broken--"

In another invisible movement, Bumblebee yanked himself away from his charge-- still holding him, but not longer wrapped fearfully around him.

"Sam, I...."

"My arm," Sam repeated firmly, content to lie there limply for a moment staring at the smoking ruins of the ceiling, even if a metal plate _was_ digging painfully into the back of his head, "Could you scan it, see if it's broken? I might need to go get a cast put on it," The trembling moved from his voice to his whole body; his teeth chattered, his toes twitched and jerked, "N-not that I like casts, they're kinda dorky, but it hurts like hell..."

There was a slight, almost unnoticable pause in the sound of Bee's inner workings, and then he replied, "Yes, your arm is broken. Sam, please--"

"Okay," he cut off the broken plea, "It's okay. I just need....could you let me up, please? I need to have a word with Optimus and then I need to get my arm fixed."

By this time, the other occupants of the room had sufficiently recovered from the shock of seeing Bumblebee's swift and brutal response to flock around the scout and his boy. Rachet and Ironhide must have heard the commotion and come running-- he was vaguely aware of them standing behind Bumblebee, furiously engaged in doing....things. Skids and Mudflap had slunk back in as well, looking as though _they_ expected to be blasted at any moment (though if the angry clip of Rachet's voice was anything to go by, they just might).

Slowly, unwillingly, Bumblebee helped Sam to his feet. He swayed in place for a moment, steadied by a hestitant (trembling?) hand across his shoulders. Then he glanced blearily at Optimus, who was staring at him with open amazement as the wickedly sharp blade extending from his forearm retracted beneath an armor plate.

"...Sam." Probably the most un-intelligent thing he had ever heard come out of the wise robot's vocalizer.

"My arm hurts," he stated without prompting, only remembering after the fact to craddle it to his chest as if it _did_ actually hurt (which it did). "Bee says it's broken. So I'm going to go get that fixed, and then you're going to tell me what Rachet and Thatcher and everyone else has been _telling_ you to tell me."

He blinked again, looking around at all the people staring at him in confoundment, not really seeing any of them save for Bee and Optimus.

"Sam...." Optimus began. Filled to the brim and overflowing, Sam went off on him.

"God damn it, what is it with everyone saying my name and then trailing off!! Oh, poor _Sam_, let's all get together and throw him a big pity-party while plotting things behind his _back_!! Things that, I don't know, involve his life!! No-no, can't tell him, he's just a kid, he needs to let those people who _know what they're doing _handle it!!"

He stopped, breathing in spasmodically, making strange little gasping noises in his throat.

"So I'm going to go get a cast for my arm now. And Optimus?"

The robot went to his knees, giving him his undivided attention.

"When I get back, I hope you trust me enough to tell me what is going on. I saved your life-- the least you could do is inform me of all the ways in which mine is being flushed down the toilet."

Brushing off Rachet's attempts at ministration, he turned and walked away from them, away from Bee, away from Optimus. And kept walking.

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Far above the surface of the earth, above the layers of thunderhead clouds and above the wisps of ice clouds, above all the thinning strata of the atmosphere, a silent monolith hung in orbit around the blue planet.

A satellite, but not. A carbon copy of one made by human hands, every detail precisely replicated except the color. This satellite was black, the color of the empty spaces between the stars.

Alive, and far more intelligent than the fly-brain software running its counterpart, the black satellite silently observed the world beneath it, ever watchful. Trillions of gigabytes of data flowed through it every second-- cell phone calls, e-mails, security cameras; bank records, military records, school records. Searching. Many, many references to a previous target, though no useful information. A cold trail. Still searching-- news broadcasts, radio broadcasts, websites.

--and for approximately 42 seconds, a new glimpse of the previous target, Samuel James Witwicky, appeared in the stream of data. 42 seconds, enough time to scan the video clip 11,234 times with its higher level processors. Analysis of data: 78% complete. Conclusion: Unusable. Location still unknown.

Analysis of data: 94% complete. New conclusion reached: Probable secondary target. Emotional connection to previous primary target. Searching.... location unknown. Conclusion: Unusable.

A burst of new data trickled down one antenna, originating not from the planet it watched but from the newly constructed Decepticon base hidden in Saturn's shadow. ::Work on symbiote, designation: Ravage, 88% complete. Probability of full recovery-- 98%. Addendum: Come on, Soundwave! Don't be such a stiff. Just one little question, that's all. Why did the chicken cross th--::

Communique terminated.

New analysis of data needed. Review tape. Logic processors circling through various plans, options, ideas, weighing the validity of each.

New Conclusion: Data status-- usable.

A channel opened, sent off a brief message to a Decepticon, designation: Starscream, relaying the proposed plan.

Waiting....

Response recieved. ::Excellent work, Soundwave. Continue.::

The drifting satellite remained as silent as ever, but within its wires a new message cycled. A change of status.

Target acquired: Mikaela Banes

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Yay! Confrontation scene coming up next chapter! All will be revealed... *waves hands mysteriously*


	7. Confrontations

Sam had never broken a bone before. In fact, he had never even been to the hospital before, excluding the time he arrived there by proxy through his mother as she gave birth to him.

To a kid, this was a very depressing state of events. No getting out of school to eat ice cream and watch TV all day, no monster scars to show off, no neon orange casts to have signed by his fifty closest friends. But at 18, he realized that having something that required going to the hospital (or the equivalent thereof) was Not Fun. Not only did the doctor in the infirmary x-ray his arm on a portable machine and stick him with about a thousand needles, he was in too much pain to really enjoy the fact that she was pretty hot. Mikaela was hotter by about a million degrees, but he assumed that every teenaged male at one point or another indulged himself in the fantasy of making out with a sexy nurse. Nope, making out with the doctor took a firm back seat to trying not to throw up all over her. In fact, any kissing at all came in last place to all the other things he didn't want to do but dreaded not doing even more. First and foremost: telling his parents and Mikaela that he had broken his arm. Oh boy.

Somehow, his blackberry had survived being sizzled by the blast from Bee's cannon and being slammed up against a wooden storage crate. The thought of losing it didn't bother him as much as two hours before-- he was as lost as a football player in a computer store when it came to what Optimus/Thatcher/Galloway/the Government were planning for him, but no longer was he certain it meant total separation from Bumblebee. A little squeeing thing inside of him did tiny little backflips at the thought that maybe Optimus was in a shitload of trouble for defying the politicians and deciding to let Bee come with them anyway. He hoped.

He pressed the button to start up the blackberry, swaying side to side in place as the brand name icon appeared on screen with a cheerful little blurt of electronic music. His arm had been swadled in white plaster from elbow to wrist (he'd asked for bright green and recieved a strange look in return) and he was currently doped up on two little pain pills of the extra-powerful variety. They took away the pain alright, and a portion of his stability-- he still felt like shit, emotionally and physically, but everything just seemed _funnier _all of a sudden. He'd even giggled a little as the doctor told him she was going to go check the results of his blood work and retreated to the office on the other end of the infirmary. Alone, fuzzy with pain and drugs, he stared at the screen for a good two minutes before he realized the garish American flag background had already loaded.

He wanted to call Mikaela-- needed to, wanted to, intended to-- but instead of punching in her number, he went to the list of recorded calls and selected Bee's string of gibberish from among the standard earthly numbers. For a moment he hesitated, longing to hear his friend's voice but fearing it would emerge as shattered and fearful as it had been in the cargo bay, back when he had laid in the alien's arms and Bee had keened in a way that tore at his own heart. ('_Sam....please, I--'_)

So instead, he sent out a text message. More impersonal. Distanced.

SamuelW: B, u there?

Because he wasn't quite sure that trying to text a number that wasn't actually a number would connect him with his friend, he felt the need to ask a question that in any other setting would have seemed redundant.

He waited. When it seemed that his friend wouldn't respond (he refused to think that he was sending out a text into a blank pocket of nothingness) he typed out another message and sent it along after the first.

SamuelW: seriously, b. we need 2 talk.

Again he waited. And waited.

SamuelW: b?

Finally, after an achingly long pause, Bumblebee sent a reply.

BuzzingBee: im here.

Sam sighed with relief (and giggled, stupid drugs). The whole day had started off crappy and gone spiralling downward from there, so he decided it would be worth a shot to try to start the whole thing over again, beginning with their disasterous conversation at the crack of dawn.

SamuelW: whats up?

He _knew_ Bee remembered his lack-luster greeting-- he had the memory capacity of 6000 super computers. He remembered everything. But apparently, the yellow scout was not in the mood to play along with the whole 'starting things over' game.

BuzzingBee: call ur parents and mikaela.

And a little message popped up saying that BuzzingBee was blocking his calls.

_Ouch._ If that was not the most obvious snub he had ever recieved, he didn't know what was. He tried not to feel too hurt about that. It didn't help that the morphine knock-off instructed him to giggle at the supremely non-funny fact that Bee possesed mind reading powers and was currently pissed at him. He lost the battle. Giggle.

Just as he started plotting ways to counterattack, the doctor strode out of her office with a clip board in hand and came to stand before his perch on one of the examination beds in the large, open room.

"Congradulations, Sam," she announced brightly, flipping through his chart, "It's a boy."

He stared at her, his eyes going as wide as saucers. It took him a minute to realize she was joking with him, at which point he scowled internally at the defunct medicine. Naturally it wouldn't make him laugh at something actually funny.

"Don't worry. I'm just playing with you," she eased, smiling prettily. Sam put a hand over his heart dramatically.

"How long do I have to live, doctor?"

She pretended to consult the chart once more.

"Well, if you keep eating your veggies and exercising regularly you'll make it to at least 90."

He tapped his fingernails absently against his cast to keep himself from giving into the impulse to collapse into fitful chuckles, though he doubted 'exercising regularly' referred to running from evil alien robots. That didn't stop him from grinning infectuously, however.

"So, no real problems with my arm? Aside from the fact that it's broken."

"Nope, no problems. Even though the bones snapped in two places, they were both relatively clean breaks. If something had been jarred out of alignment, I would have had to put you under to reset the bone," her friendly gaze turned quizzical, and almost suspicious. "How did you break your arm, again?"

"I fell," he blurted, then racked his brains for the rest of his genius-level story, "Down two flights of stairs."

"Two flights of stairs."

Oh yeah, definitely suspicious now. Sam really, _really_ didn't want to deal with a suspicious doctor who wouldn't understand or react well to 'my friend thought I was a decepticon and tired to turn me into Spam with his cannon'. In only one day (had it really only been less than a full day?) he had frightened Bee, found out he couldn't go back to college, beaten up a politician with a breakfast tray, freaked out in a janitor's closet, sat through many torturous hours in a debriefing, learned his friend wouldn't be coming home with him, viewed the carnage of several dead bodies, realized that he was the most wanted person on the face of the planet, threw a sandwich into a wall, spied on Optimus scheming about him (heard Optimus called a jackass...giggle...), been blasted from an air vent, slammed into a wall, and threatened with an ion cannon wielded by his best friend. Now his arm was broken and he had so many people he needed to talk to, lie to, comfort and confront he just wanted to _scream_, pack it all up in a cardboard box and shove it over the side of a cliff. End of story, now Sam gets to go stuff his face with pizza, sleep till noon, and play videogames with Miles all the next day in his NORMAL life. (well, maybe not the pizza part-- he still felt like he might need a bucket.)

"Yep. Two flights of stairs," at her disbelieving look, he elaborated, "I tripped. And fell. Down, you know, two flights of stairs. Oh, and I broke my arm."

She didn't look like she trusted him as far as she could have chucked Optimus, but she obviously decided to just let it go. "Well, try to be more coordinated in the future. The injuries you came out of the desert with are still healing-- any more 'falling down two flights of stairs' might undo all the good a few days of rest have done."

"I'll make sure he has a mattress or two to land on," Mikaela spoke up from the doorway.

The sound of his girl friend's voice startled Sam into a whole-body flinch. Not a good thing, in retrospect, as the motion jarred his broken arm and reminded him of how extraordinarily painful broken limbs could be.

"Mikaela!" he squeaked guiltily as she strode casually through the door. He cleared his throat, then practiced his skills at stating the obvious. "You're here."

She came to the side of his bed and hoisted herself up beside him, swinging her dangling feet. He tried not to stare at her tanned legs.

"Rachet called me in full-blown mother hen mode to come check on you. He would have come himself, except that he wouldn't fit through the door."

Sam darted a glance at the doctor as she moved a respectful distance away to check some equipment. She didn't seem surprised at the mention of the alien passenger, so he relaxed marginally. Accidentally spilling the beans to a civilian would have just been one more thing he really didn't need.

"I'm fine. My arm's just busted-- it's not like I'm dead or anything."

The creeping, crawling, itching started to work its way from his spine to his finger tips, making them tremble with the need to get a message to Bumblebee. He needed, for his own sanity, to bring his friend out of his funk. Hell, HE was the one who had almost been blown to pieces. If anyone had a right to be huffy, it was him. Suddenly stumbling over an idea, he called up an internet browser on the WiFi connection.

Mikaela leaned against him (on his good side, luckily) and rested her chin on his shoulder to see what he was doing.

"Well that's good. Otherwise I'd have to drag you back so I could kill you for putting me through your death, _again_. And then I'd have to drag you back again after I killed you so I could kiss you senseless."

"Sounds like fun," he answered, distracted, as he typed out an e-mail to Bumblebee's address, "The kissing part, I mean. The rest not so much."

Mikaela heaved a theatrical sigh. "Rachet would have a cow if I did, though. The killing part, that is. And then Bee would kick my butt."

He sent the first e-mail and started working on another one.

"I certainly hope not. I like your butt. --Hey!" He cried out as she got him in a head lock from the side and gave him a vigorous noogy. Though he blushed to his ears at the second grade antics, the childish contact warmed him from the inside out like a big mug of hot coco. "You're messing up my hair!" he whined, grinning so much it hurt. For once, the expression felt real.

"Baby. Your hair's not short enough to mess up." His tormenter released his head and gave him a playful shove.

"But you've got to admit, it's certainly stylish." Sam waggled his eyebrows and passed a hand over his hair. The ploy worked-- Mikaela threw back her head and laughed.

Pressing send on the second e-mail, Sam opened a new page and started working on a third. There was no way he was going to let them end on bad terms. So yeah, okay, he could see why Bumblebee would be mad at him. Furious, even. He'd spied on their leader, then gone and almost gotten himself killed. Heck, he'd be mad at himself in Bumblebee's place. But if he had to say goodbye, the last thing he wanted was to leave with his best friend still pissed at him. So he was going to fix this. Somehow.

Craning her neck to look over his shoulder when he returned his attention to the blackberry in his hands, Mikaela asked warily, "Sam, what are you doing?"

"Spamming Bumblebee."

She processed that for a moment, then repeated, "You're spamming Bumblebee. With e-mails."

"Yep. He blocked my texts."

Suddenly tense, she straightened away from him.

"You mean he hasn't come talk to you yet?"

_That_ made him look up from composing his fourth message.

"No. He's been avoiding me. Why?"

"Because Optimus ordered him to come talk to you."

Sam froze, blinking, like a deer in the headlights.

"You've been to see Optimus?"

"Yeah." Unexpectedly, she shivered. "It was scary, Sam. I've never seen him so angry. _Never_. Not even when fighting Megatron or the Fallen. It was like being in the middle of a lightning storm-- I thought he was going to start shooting at any minute."

"...at _Bee_?"

"No, at Mudflap and Skids."

Sam cringed, ducking his head with a sigh. "So you know, then," he muttered, stealthily sending out another nagging e-mail.

Mikaela grimaced. "Yeah. But don't worry, I don't blame Bee. It was just a misunderstanding. I blame you."

"Me? But I'm the invalid, here! See?" he held up his broken arm, "Have pity on a man in a cast!" But then his train of thought carried him to the next logical conclusion, and his let his cast-swaddled arm drop back to his side, mood sinking like a rock. "I guess my parents know too, then."

Just what he wanted to deal with. He had hoped to ply them with the same story he had used on the doctor, counting on their natural inclination to believe the more innocent version of events to keep him from a painful argument about his choice in friends. Painful, because on some level he knew that, if it came down to it, he would choose his guardian angel over his parents. That wasn't a choice he wanted to have to make.

But Mikaela surprised him. "No, they don't. Not yet. I was supposed to tell them (working from the theory that they would be more responsive to another human) but I thought you should be the one to do it."

"Yeah," he answered hollowly, mood roller-coastering up and down, "Thanks."

Planting her hands on the bed, Mikaela leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. It was such a sweet, sisterly, and somehow sexy thing to do. It reminded him that he did have an anchor after all-- his girl friend.

"Don't worry," She breathed against his neck, making his heart race, "At least you have something to do to give you time to think up a good excuse."

Spaming Bee with a single-letter e-mail, Sam tilted his face down towards her and touched his lips to the tip of her nose.

"Yeah? Like what?" He murmured, hoping she was thinking about getting into a much-needed make out session.

"Like talking to Optimus."

Damn. Not only was she good at making a freezer start to steam, she was also adept at sudden turn offs. Feeling suddenly sulky, Sam pulled back and hunched over his blackberry, forgoing the typing out of actual messages in favor of sending various letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, all designed to fill up Bee's inbox. He couldn't give him the silent treatment forever. Already he must have pushed 'send' at least 27 times.

"Yeah, well, he's been keeping me in the dark, so maybe it's time he got a taste of his own medicine-- turn about is fair play, and all that."

Mikaela pulled back and pinned him with a flat look. "So you're going bitch about him not telling you anything, and then go and not _let_ him tell you anything."

Childishly he refused to meet her eyes, pretending to be absorbed by e-mail number 34. She threw up her hands in exasperation and slid off the bed.

"Well, when you decide to grow up and behave like an adult give me a call. I have to go tell Leo what's going on-- he's convinced the Twins stuffed you in a meat locker with dead bodies or something."

Sam jerked his head up as she snapped off a little wave and turned to leave, pleading, "Don't tell him what actually happened, ok? I've had enough of people wigging out on me for one day."

She lifted an eyebrow. "Are you counting yourself? Nevermind," she added when he opened his mouth to object, "What's the story we're going to use?"

Deciding that he really didn't want to hang around in the antisecptic-scented infirmary anymore, Sam mirrored her and slid from the bed with considerably less grace than his girl friend.

"You already heard it, remember?"

"'I fell down two flights of stairs'?" A wry snort. "Please. No one would believe that you're _that_ clumsy."

"No really," he insisted, sliding a glance to the doctor working half way across the room and knowing she was listening in, "I DID fall down two flights of stairs." And he jerked an indicative thumb at their inconspicious watcher.

Mikaela only laughed, tossing her hair over her shoulder and sauntering away.

"Whatever you say, Sam. Whatever you say."

Trying not to appear clingy, he waited until she vanished out of sight down the hallway to follow her through the door. To his intense morification, he could have sworn he heard muffled laugher from behind him as the door swung shut on his heels.

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When under the influence of drugs, various body parts had a habit of disobeying him. His stomach, for one, would not stop informing him that he needed to remain in close proximity to a bathroom. His arm, too, ignored his mentally shouted commands to Stop Hurting Damnit! And his feet, in direct defiance of his conscious mind, lead him away from the cargo bay and up towards the flight deck.

Despite all of his vehement rants and embarassing outbursts, now that the time had come he feared hearing the truth. Not that he objected to truth in general, but in his experience the most outrageous, terrifying, and potentially lethal things that had come from the Autobots' vocalizers turned out to be true. World-endingly true. ('_We must find those glasses', 'He's going to use it to destroy the sun_!') And his world had already ended enough for one day, thank-you-very-much. The part of him fed on adrenaline roared that it was his life and that he _needed_, deserved to know what was going on and wanted to watch Optimus squirm for plotting behind his back. But another, slightly larger part of him hoped that if he ignored whatever it was it would go away. Fade out. Become nothing more than a dream (don't think about the nightmares, thinking about them keeps them with you).

So he stumped down a few hallways and climbed a few flights of stairs, seeking out the calming brilliance of the stars. Light, but not too much of it. Silent beauty that remained unchanged no matter how the ground beneath his feet heaved. As he walked he continued to pummel Bee's address with e-mails (65). Away from Mikaela's calming influence, his fears and doubts began to ooze from the cracks in his mind again. Maybe he should give his friend the space he obviously wanted-- maybe Bee was so angry with him he wanted Sam to stew for a while in his own funk. Grudgingly he had to admit that it would serve him right. The yellow scout was his friend, but he had overstepped his bounds. No matter how strong his own curiosity, he had no right to spy on them. Even if the truth had finally (partially) come out, he still felt lower than dirt. Perhaps not enough to choose a different path if he could go back and do everything over again, but enough to ensure that whenever he finally collapsed into bed it would not be to sleep.

At last he twisted the rotating axel to open the ground-level door onto the flight deck (awkward to do with only one arm) and stepped out into the cool evening air. A playful breeze tugged at his clothes and tousled his hair as he pushed the door closed behind him and drew in a deep, cleansing breath. The rows of planes, crouched before him in the near dark like so many giant birds come down to roost, glowed silver in the moonlight. Save for the hissing churn of waves as the carrier plowed forward through the ocean, all was quiet. Peaceful.

Shivering slightly from the night chill, he tucked his fists beneath his arms and wandered farther out onto the deck. At last he could think and _breathe_ without something or someone reminding him at every turn of how very screwed he was. The inanimate jets (don't think of starscream don't think of starscream) didn't care. The deck beneath his feet didn't care. The ocean didn't care. The stars didn't care. This place, these things, would continue on with or without him, never knowing or stopping to realize that standing among them was Samuel James Witwicky, the most wanted person in the world. God, sometimes he hated having his name.

Unwrapping his arms to zip up his jacket, he tilted his head back to look at the stars. He could only spot a few of the familiar constellations, and even those were upside down. Thinking back to the time Bumblebee had pointed out Cybertron (my friend, my guardian angel-- come back...), he tried to find the pin prick of light from which alien visitors had descended to earth. But the sky wavered and danced before his eyes in a way that did nothing to assuage his nausea, refusing to hold still for long enough to allow him to search out the oft-observed star.

Whatever. He hugged himself beneath his jacket for warmth, quickly coming to the realization that the light ocean spray wetting his exposed skin and the chilly air were not a pleasant combination. Though he did not particularly wish to return inside and seek out either Optimus or his parents, neither did he want to get sick and have to add a cold to his swiftly growing list of things amiss in the Sam universe. With one last glance out at the undulating ocean, he turned to go back inside.

---And stopped cold, heart leaping up into his throat, at the sight of Optimus Prime crouched on the second level deck of the observation tower, watching him. Directly beneath the silent monolith of living metal, one floor down, stood the door through which he had passed. Awed shivers trailed their icy fingers up and down his spine; the Autobot leader had been there, watching him, waiting for him, ever since he had first stepped out onto the deck.

Though he _knew_ Optimus would not harm him, he didn't dare take a step forward. Awash in starlight, the robot's body seemed to change, becoming more dangerous, more alien. The patriotic red and blue faded out into the gray of night; every metal plate, every angle, caught the wane light with a knife-edge gleam. The two optics riveted to his wooden form glowed an intense, unwavering blue that pierced through the gloom like the watching eyes of some repentant demon.

As the alien leader slowly, sinuously, unfolded himself from his crouch and dropped without a whisper of sound to the deck below, Sam felt his palms grow slick with sweat. His heart boomed between his ears, each pulse shaking his whole body. Instantly he felt annoyed with himself. This was _Optimus_-- the world-saving, ass-kicking, sorta-friend that had given his life to save him from the wrath of Megatron. In defiance of animal instincts that screamed 'predator' he took a few shaky steps forward to meet the approaching Autobot half way.

"Hey, Optimus," he greeted, working for nonchalance and failing spectacularly. He sounded like a young boy going to meet his girl friend's ex-con father for the first time-- and when he had done _that_ he hadn't sounded nearly this frightened. Maybe because Mikaela's father wasn't thirty feet tall. And made of metal. And totting giant guns and swords. "Nice weather tonight, huh? Can't usually see this many stars at home-- it's pretty sweet. The cold sucks, though. Do Cybertronians even get cold? I mean of course Megadork was, they kept him frozen after all, but does chilly weather bother you guys?"

Optimus let him talk himself into a hole uninterrupted, only moving to stand right beside him and looking down at the smaller human. In the dark, the only thing he could see of the robotic face were his blue optics. Not that a robotic face usually gave away all that much (they'd be awesome at poker), but usually there was at least a twitch to go by. Now, there was nothing but a looming shadow from which gleamed two impossibly bright eyes.

"I had thought, after your outburst earlier, that you would come sweeping back into the cargo bay with all the fury of a hurricane," Optimus commented quietly, not even bothering to answer Sam's rambling questions. They both knew that whether or not cybertronians got cold was not the issue on the forefront of his mind.

"Yeah, well, you know how it is," Sam evaded, dreading the way the entire lop-sided conversation seemed to be leading up to the very discussion he now wanted to avoid at all costs, "Pain and happy pills are good at taking the wind out of your sails-- I mean, good at calming you down from a hurricane of fury to something the consistency of fudge. Not a lot of fight left."

"It heartens me considerably to see that you are, indeed, calmer. Or at least not ready to physcially attack me."

Sam had to snort at that, attempting to edge his way around one large foot. The door was only twenty feet away. "Optimus, even majorly pissed off, I'm not suicidal enough to try to attack you. The fight would be over as soon as you stepped on me."

Ever watchful, the alien caught his surreptitious sneaking and moved his foot to properly block his route of escape.

"I should hope you would think better of me than to worry about my 'stepping on you'."

Completely missing the strained note to the robotic voice, Sam continued his edging, trying to think of a way to stall him for long enough to make a break for it.

"Figure of speech."

He knew Optimus wasn't fooled by his careful sidestepping of the question, but he didn't comment on it. The robot turned to track his movements as he slowly backed his way towards the door, hands shoved into his pockets despite the cold in an effort to seem unpreturbed. Crossed arms was a classic defensive posture. Thank you, high school psychology.

"Sam," Optimus said softly, "We need to talk."

Heart fluttering like a caged bird inside his chest, he continued to back away, even as the other took a minute step forward to maintain the distance between them. "Talk! Talk is good. What do you want to talk about? There's the weather, but we kinda already covered that. Or we could swap manly, er, stories and laugh till we puke-- well, _I'd_ puke, maybe without even needing a story to get me going."

"I know that you are frightened, Sam. But now that you have discovered that I have been conferring with General Thatcher about you, it is time you heard the whole truth. You certainly seemed to want it an hour ago."

Ten feet. He could make it. He could stop this train wreck before it started (--ignore them and they'll go away--). "That was an hour ago," he shot back, "And now I've decided I really don't want to have to listen to you lying to me anymore. So no, I don't want to talk about _this_--" he gestured with a furious hand to the not-so-large space between them, "--whatever _this_ is. Whatever you and Thatcher were planning, you can both stuff it," Five feet. So close. "Stuff it under your hat, stuff it in a sock, just _get rid of it_, because I don't want any part of it. I have a life, and I'm very eager to get back to it." He paused in his tirade to refill his lungs with the sweet night air, turning away from Optimus. "I have to go tell my parents that I'll be in plaster for the next six weeks before the go Mt. Vesuvious on me," he paused awkwardly, finally tearing his eyes away from the metal giant. "So bye."

His hand brushed the door, but he never had the chance to open it.

Optimus effortlessly plucked him up by the back of his jacket and pulled him away from the portal to freedom.

"Hey!"

The alien brought him close to his chest, trapping him between his hands as he curled his body around the human-- and began to transform.

Sam had seen Bumblebee transform several times up close, but never _this_ close. Every part of the metal body all but exploded outwards, splitting apart along thousands, millions of invisible seams, shifting, rearranging, sliding, reforming according a pattern impossibly complex yet somehow made reality. It was like a giant robot-shaped Rubick's cube, albiet one with pieces smaller than the nail of his pinky.

Another difference between this transformation and Bumblebee's was the fact that he was not watching it occur from the outside-- it was happening around him. Living pieces of shifting metal cascaded over his head, abruptly cutting off his vision. He was lifted up, buffeted, curled into a tiny ball and pushed this way and that with the same gentleness that marked all the Autobots' interactions with humans-- though jostled and terrified out of his mind, he was not harmed.

In a matter of seconds that seemed to Sam to have spanned several hours, he found himself dropping heavily onto the seat in Optimus' cab. The curve of the steering wheel snapped together and locked into place, clear liquid flowed UP from the doors and dashboard to form the windows and windshield, numbers and letters appeared on the instrument panel like oil separating from water. Breath heaving from his chest at a rate near hyperventilation, Sam looked widly around, stunned to find himself sitting in the interior of the very ordinary looking truck.

Then, he did something that only seemed very natural to any human used to non-thinking vehicles-- he slid across the seat and pulled on the door handle. Not only was the door locked, the handle reacted as though carved from stone, refusing to budge even an inch at his insistent tugging.

"This is BULLSHIT!" he exploded, still jiggling the handle frantically. And though he knew the result would prove to be the same, just to satisfy his need as a human to beat his head against the proverbial wall he slid all the way across the bench seat and tried the other door. Yep, still shut tight. Might as well not have been a door at all. "You cheated!" It really, really, really didn't seem fair.

"We need to talk," Optimus repeated calmly, sounding as though he were sitting beside him rather than forming the truck around him, "Though you may not wish to hear what I have to say, you will simply have to 'suck it up and deal with it'."

"No. No! _No! _NO!** NO!**" He cried wildly, hysterically, "I'm sick of this! I'm sick of you and how you always need me to come clean up after you! What part of 'I'm a teenager and don't know how to handle this shit' don't you understand!!"

Releasing the handle with a snap, he reared back and smashed one curled fist into the window with all his strength. It was a good thing the solid-yet-not material bowed outward to accomadate the blow, or else he would have probably broken his hand.

"First you show up and tell me I need to find a pair of dinky old glasses to keep Megatron from taking over the world, and that was okay, because what did I care about the stupid things?! But then somehow that morphed into, 'You have to destroy the allspark, Sam' and I ended up getting blown off a fucking BUILDING!! Then, just when government stooges stop dropping by every week and my life FINALLY starts getting back to normal, YOU pull me away from college after ONE DAY and tell me that I need to do even MORE world-saving shit, because once just obviously wasn't enough!!"

He sucked in gasp after gasp through rattling teeth, trembling as though he might shake to pieces. Directionless anger grew and fed on itself in its chest, breaking loose of his carefully maintained moorings and flaring into a firestorm that consumed all else. Every scrap of frustration, of terror, of righteous indignation, of the sense that none of it was any fair came roaring up inside of him all at once. He needed something, anything, to lash out at and rid himself of fire so hot that it threatened to roast him alive if he didn't break something. But there was nothing breakable within reach. So he settled for taking everything out on Optimus' cab.

The alien leader uttered not a word, gave not even so much as a twitch, as he repeatedly pummeled his one good fist into the window. He tore at the seats with his fingernails, kicked the steering wheel with all his might, rained blows down upon the dash. He growled like a wild, savage thing, screaming, "LET ME OUT! _LET ME OUT! __**LET ME OUT**_!".

But Optimus did not let him out. And little by little the storm raged itself out, calmed, and passed. When the last drop of fury had been expended, he lay down on the seat and curled his knees to his chest, sobbing openly and not giving a damn that he had a witness to his break in manhood. Screw manhood. It had nothing to offer to help him with this.

"Okay," he whispered at last, hiccuping slightly, "I think I'm done now."

"Are you sure? I think there are a few places you haven't managed to bruise," Optimus commented wryly, but without heat.

"I'm sure. I think I just had that on my chest of a while," he sniffed, wiping his sleeve across his eyes and feeling even more miserable at the word 'bruise'. "This will probably sound stupid and really inappropriate right now, but I 'm sorry if I hurt you. I just needed to...I don't know. Thrash all that out, or something."

"I know. And that is why I allowed you to continue unhindered. Despite what you may think of how much my soldiers respect me, you are certainly not the first to take out your anger by physically attacking me."

Seeing the extended opening to a less painful subject, Sam pushed himself upright. Regardless of Optimus' words, he could not imagine any of the other Autobots attacking the great leader.

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Oh." He cast around for another topic, trying the handle more calmly this time and beating back his rising ire as he still found it locked tight. Since it was, of course, his body, Optimus felt the attempt and turned the conversation back to a more serious, and feared, topic.

"Sam, you are obviously under a misapprehension which I need to correct. When I say that we need to talk about your future, I am not referring to an attmept to, ah, cajole you into 'saving the world' again."

Despite the assurance, fear twinged in a corner of his mind the way a fly would disturb a spider web.

"That doesn't make me feel much better, Optimus," He chuckled humorlessly.

Outside the cab, the weather had started to change; wisps of fog began to trail lazily accross the windshield, obscuring the stars. He prayed that the gloomy shift was not an omen of some sort, but the way his life seemed to go it probably was.

For a long moment Optimus held his silence, giving the impression that he was taking his time to get his thoughts in order. For beings that could calculate thousands of possible reaction scenarios in the middle of a battle in under a second, that was saying something.

"You should probably know first that I am thrice indebted to you, Sam."

Whatever he might have feared to be the robot's opening words, those certainly were certainly the last he expected.

"Okay, I'm confused. I can see the whole bringing you back to life thing as counting as one, but what about the other two?"

"The second, as you say, comes from your brave actions againt Megatron in Mission City."

Feeling inexplicably embarassed and humbled, he ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

"That doesn't really count, though, because you were planning on sacraficing yourself anyway. I just made it so that you didn't have to."

"And in doing so you destroyed Megatron, something I have never been able to achieve," Optimus refutted quietly, the same hint of steely determination in his voice, "If I had indeed sacraficed myself to destroy the allspark, Megatron would have surely wreaked unholy vengence on the rest of my soldiers and on the human race as a whole. Your actions not only spared my life, they prevented the deaths of countless others."

Sam shook his head, suddenly exhausted, and leaned against the window.

"I guess for right now we'll just have to agree to disagree, since I still don't think that counts as saving your life. And what's the third item on this list of yours?"

But Optimus had gone silent again. Sam's heart beat picked up in response.

"I do not think you realize," he said slowly, wonderingly, "How very much you mean to Bumblebee."

"Bumblebee?" Sam blinked, thrown for a loop. "What does Bumblebee have to do with this?"

"Everything. For you see, even though we do not have mothers and fathers as does your race-- since we do not reproduce-- we do have something caller 'Creators', those who help to design and construct the new shells into which a spark from the AllSpark would be transfered. I was one of Bumblebee's creators. In human terms, you could think of me as his adoptive father."

Sam leaned back against the soft leather (leather-yet-not, alien as the rest of him) and slowly shook his head from side to side, floored. The first thought that occured to him was rather inane-- Bumblebee must have gotten his looks from his mother, because red and blue mixed together _so_ did not make a golden yellow. But then that thought burst into nothingness under the weight of another, more serious one.

"Wait, you let your SON be one of your soldiers?" He blurted in stunned outrage, unable to wrap his mind around the concept. "But you send them out to fight Decepticons! As in, maybe to _die_!"

Only after the fact did he realize what an awful thing that was to say. Way to go, Sam; open mouth, insert foot.

There was no meaningful pause this time, but Optimus' voice was now laden with an abyss of sorrow. "And if I had designed him without any weapons, sheltered him away from the fighting as best I could, he _would_ have been killed. Bumblebee came online during a time when our entire planet was near destruction, no part untouched by war. Though I longed for him not to have to see and experience the horrors to which I had been an intimate witness, I knew that the best way for him to have a chace to ever know a life beyond war was to have the ability to survive it."

"So you-- _designed_-- him to be a scout?" Sam couldn't hide the apalled timbre coloring his tone.

But once more, Optimus surprised him. "No. As I have said, I was not Bumblebee's sole creator-- the others working on his sparkless body wanted to build the perfect shock trooper, a warrior that could survive on the front lines and keep fighting even with injuries that would normally prove incapacitating."

Sam leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, heart twisting into knots at the thought of sweet, sensitive, gentle Bee being metaphorically thrown to the dogs and sent to fend for his life against wave after crashing wave of advancing decepticons. Feeling abruptly ill, he would have traded an arm (preferably the broken one) for a sick bag so he wouldn't foul Optimus' interior with hurl whiff.

"But he's not," he whispered hoarsely, stumbling over the contradiction in the story, "He's not a shock trooper. He's a scout."

"Yes. And that is partially my doing, though mostly his. You see, I could not presuade the others to leave Bumblebee a functionless protoform-- that is, one without a pre-designed purprose hard wired into their shells before being given a spark. So I returned in secret after they had gone and erased all traces of shock trooper programming. I left Bumblebee, in essence, a blank slate. Though I could not in good conscience leave him weaponless, I wanted to give him the chance to develop according to the urgings of his spark and his spark alone."

A whirling noise that could have been a sigh came from the truck. "To my mingled relief and chargin, Bumblebee proved not only to be an exceptional warrior, but a talented scout as well, perhaps the best our planet has seen since the Golden Age. But I held him back, never sending on any of the most dangerous missions and never sending him out alone. Like any human teenager--" his voice took on a pointed humor, making Sam flush again, "--he was eager to prove himself. After a while, the war began to turn in our favor and I felt confident enough to send him alone on his first mission to scout an asteroid mine in a relatively low-risk area. I thought he would be perfectly safe." A long, regretful pause during which the very air thickened with years of nurtured sorrow. His voice grew softer, becoming almost too low to hear. "I was wrong."

Together they sat in silence for an unmeasured eternity of time, watching the vaporous fog thicken and begin to creep across the deck like the formless essence of restless souls, of painful memories.

Horrified that he thought he knew where this story was going, Sam didn't want to hear the rest. Hearing it would make it real, and he couldn't stand the thought of anything awful happening to his best friend-- especially something he could neither prevent nor fix. And yet gnawing curiosity began to eat away at his insides, at his fingertips, consuming him with an itch he could not scratch.

Finally, he worked up enough courage to clear his throat and ask with a hoarse voice, "What happened?"

Again Optimus emitted a whirring noise that somehow conveyed oceans of despair and remorse-- tears from a being that could not cry. "...There was an ambush waiting at the mine. The Decepticons had hoped the I would come in person, and when they captured Bumblebee instead they decided to take out their disappointment on him. ...Those were the longest three weeks of my life."

Sam's fingers gripped the steering wheel so hard he thought it might snap in his grip. Helpless anger set his teeth on edge, giving him the furious stength to ignore the painful protests of his broken arm. A fractured bone was nothing, _nothing_ compared to what he could only imagine Bumblebee had gone through _('...I have endured torture far worse than anything S7 could ever hope to do...'_). Oh, _Bee_....

"When we found him," Optimus continued, "his voice box had been mangled beyond repair. One of the decepticons we interrogated revealed that his captors could not force Bumblebee to reveal any information, not even after two weeks of torture that had broken Autobots older, stronger, and wiser than he.... So they ripped out his throat so they would not have to listen to him scream."

Forget puking. All of Sam's insides abruptly vanished, creating a vacuum so strong that the agony of it threatened to crush him into a little speck. He couldn't breathe. (what kind of evil would chain an angel down and clip its wings?)

"You mean he-- he didn't crack? They did all that and he still didn't betray you?" He gapsed out with the last little bit of air in his lungs.

"No." The word held a note of almost spiritual wonder. "Bumblebee was, and is, the most loyal being I have ever encountered in the universe. You cannot imagine how much it pains him to know he hurt you."

"But it was an accident!" Sam insisted, "He thought I was a Decepticon or something--"

"Yet no matter how well intentioned his actions were, he still hurt you," Optimus cut across him, "More than that, he feels that he has shattered your trust in him. He is dedicated to you as he is to no one else, not even me. And he feels that, as your guardian, he has failed you."

Sam thought of mentioning the way his 'guardian' had blocked his texts and stubbornly refused to let him apologize, but decided against it. Though he still didn't want to find out what Optimus had been planning about behind his back, anything was better than the major league Bumblebee-inspired guilt trip he was currently on. Mentioning the scout's refusal to talk to him would only further the conversation in the same painful vein.

"So what does all this have to do with the 'thrice indebted' thing?"

"When Bumblebee was finally rescued," Optimus went on, seeming to ingore him, "He was not the same Autobot I had sent off on his first solo mission. In some indefinable way, the part of him that was Bumblebee had died. He functioned as flawlessly as ever, never missing a step in battle, never losing a target he tracked. But his shell had become as hollow as before being granted a spark. I believe the human term to describe it would be 'souless'."

"He's fine now, though! What does this have to do with--"

"Bumblebee is now 'fine', Samuel James Witwicky, for the sole reason that he has found someone to live for again. He has found_ you_."

Caught breathless in a stunned, limp haze, Sam's mind flashed back to his breakdown in the janitor's closet when Bee had told him that, no matter Sam's interpretation of the matter, the human had saved him in a way far more important than freeing him from Simmon's clutches. At the time he had gone along with it to pacify Bee, though his mind had continued to assult his heart with poison-tipped arrows of guilt and endless snapshots from the night where he had failed the most important task ever given to him (ice, so much ice, struggles weakening against the cold, and still the voiceless angel _screamed_--). He had never considered that Bee was sharing a carefully guarded slice of his heart, bearing it to his scrutiny, leaving himself open for a brutal attack. He had never believed that the alien's words might be _true_.

Sam couldn't speak, not even one tiny little word (no words existed for this-- something too powerful to be expressed in things as mundane as letters).

"Bumblebee is very dear to me, Sam. Dearer than my own spark. I owe you my life for a third time because in saving him, you saved me."

Breathe in, hold it, breathe out. Lean forward, elbows to knees, and cover prickling eyes with a shaking hand. He was only Sam. Just Sam. He wasn't stronger, faster, smarter, kinder, or more friendly than anyone else. There was no reason for Bumblebee to have chosen him to befriend. The bubbly feeling of mingled happiness and awe growing inside of him slowly fizzled away at the thought that Bee was only his friend out of convenience-- that the alien had simply latched onto the first friendly face he had encountered. Not that he would go back in time and trade places with someone else to test that theory; he was worshipfully grateful he had been chosen, whether by luck or cosmic design. Forcing down the snide little voice whispering that he was not worthy, Sam slowly straightened up.

"Alright. Three times, then. You say you're in my debt three times over. That means...what, exactly?"

Once again, though Optimus gave no outwardly signal that could be precieved by the five senses, Sam felt a shift in the Peterbilt's mood, this time from one of solemn reflection to tense resolution. The tense part he could understand given his previous outburst, but the curious flavor of stony resolve mystified him. And terrified him (and he must have been slipping a gear, because he had no way of sensing either from a truck).

"It means that my life belongs to you now, and it is encumbent upon my honor that I take whatever steps necessary-- no matter how radical-- to ensure your protection."

"Wait." The fingers of his good hand curled tighly around the edge of the seat. "Sorry, but you're not making any sense. Why separate me from Bumblebee if you're trying to protect me? I only have, I don't know--" he unclenched his hand and began to count off on his fingers, "--about, oh say, _several dozen _alien robots that are crazier than a half-full box of fruit loops trying to turn me into decorative wall art!"

Ever serene, Optimus did not react to his shout. "Which is why you will not be separated from Bumblebee--"

YEEEESSS!!! He shoots, he scores! Sam could have almost kissed the peterbilt right on the gear shift for having the balls to stand up to the snot-nosed, brief-case totting polticians, give them the Optimus version of a stuck out tongue, and do whatever he felt like anyway. Which, in this case, seemed to include keeping the dynamic duo (not real, never real, clinging from need not love) together.

"---rather, you will be accompanying us back to NEST headquarters after we dock in India."

And his storm of thunderous mental applause ground to an abrupt halt. It took several tries to process the statement, running it backwards and forewards under an internal microscope. Even once he pieced together the literal meaning of the words, the implications behind it remained elusive. Unthinkable.

"...What?"

"I don't know if you realize this, Sam," Optimus imparted hesitantly, "But no one beyond ourselves and select key officials within the US government know that the Fallen's power has been eradicated. The rest of the world is still looking for you."

"Yeah, I know," he waved it off, wishing he would get to the point, "I saw the story running on every news station in the world before the twins-- before I ended up in the cargo bay. So yeah. It sucks, but I know. I'm hoping they'll put out a statement or something that will get everyone off my back. But what did you mean by that thing you said before? The NEST thing?"

"Regardless of my personal feelings on the matter, we cannot inform the rest of the world of what occured in Egypt. To do so would be to give vital information to the Decepticons in the process of 'getting everyone off your back'," He tone shifted, becoming almost sympathetic, "In the interest of protecting you from your fellow humans, you will be coming with us back to NEST where your location will be unknown and where we can better protect you."

The taste of sour bile filled Sam's mouth, causing him to grimace.

"I may not like it, but I guess that makes sense. I was kinda flipped out about that, before-- the whole thing about how I might as well have a sign reading, 'Wanted dead or alive, gazillion dollar reward', tattoed into my forehead. How long do you think I will have to stay?"

No answer. The truck around him seemed, for a moment, to be nothing more than a dark, silent hunk of metal. The fog had become a restless white wall, devouring the fight deck around them and setting them adrift in nothingness. "Optimus?" His voice began to waver without his permission, "I'll only have to stay with you guys for a few months, right? Just until this whole thing blows over?"

"There are more than your fellow humans to consider, Sam."

"...No..."

"Even if, eventually, all the world's governments cease hunting you-- and even if, in a perfect world, every last psychopathic individual ceases to hunt for you--"

"No."

"--The decepticons will never rest until they have obliterated you."

"No!"

"And while you are around them," he added softly, "your family is in danger as well. Mikaela is in danger."

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!"

Optimus was right, of course. Arrogant robot always had to be right. The Decepticons had nothing else to lose-- not Cybertron, not their leader, the Fallen, not even the Allspark. And the most dangerous enemy was always the ax-wielding maniac with nothing to lose. Every fiber of his being longed to scream in denial, longed to rebel for the sake of rebelling against a universe apparently determined to take everything he held dear away from him, but there was no part of the robot's reasoning he could refute. If he had taken the time to think about it, he would have probably figured all of those things out on his own, though he would never have come to the conclusion that it was in his best interest to uproot him from his home. He would have found a way to make it work. Optimus just didn't want to give him a chance.

Shoving the angry, foaming-at-the-mouth part of him into a deep hole in his mind, he conciously relaxed his shoulder muscles, uncurled his fists (ignored the throbbing of his arm beneath the cast) and lounged back against the seat, palms open on his knees. Calm. Reasonable.

"I'm going home, and you can't stop me." Okay, so maybe more infantile than reasonable, but at least his voice remained steady and at a normal decibel level. "And if you try to, remember that there are at least 380 million people who object to kidnapping. Especially kidnapping a fellow American."

One human was no match for an Autobot, but he doubted even Optimus was deluded enough to try his luck at over a million to one odds. But when the peterbilt spoke again, he didn't seem to be backing down.

"Galloway called me while you were being fitted with a cast."

With a start, Sam remembered that slimey git had been brow beaten into assisting Thatcher and Optimus with their plan. Wow, that guy worked fast.

"As of approximately 45 minutes ago," the Autobot continued, "You are no longer a citizen of the United States."

The words hit him like ten thousand volts, momentarily stopping his heart.

American citizenship-- two words coveted by millions of people all over the world. The topic of dreams, books, and life-changing voyages to a land unknown. Never one to be particularly patriotic, Sam had nevertheless come to realize how thankful he was to have been born in the USA after seeing the state of the slums in Egypt. He had rights, liberties, voting privileges and those sorts of things; he could make fun of a senator's big nose all he wanted without fearing retribution. America-- and, by extension, California-- may not have been perfect (far from it, in fact) but it was his _home_. He'd never even been to so much as Canada before being teleported to the Egyptian desert. America was quirky, multi-lingual and multi-racial, bullying and protecting, irritating and endearing. He didn't know _how_ to be anything else but American.

Yet somehow, without his knowledge, it had all been taken away from him. No more driver's license, no more passport, no more 'Born in California' birth certificate, no more constitutional rights. Just as happened in all those cheesy sci fi movies, he'd been erased. Sam didn't trust himself to speak. More than that, he didn't know what, if anything, to say.

Optimus seemed to be waiting for him to react. Well, he wasn't going to do him the courtesy of either erupting in vengeful rage or pretending that what he had done was okay. So he simply sat there, staring at the fog with unblinking eyes, concentrating on nothing beyond existing.

After a few moments, the Autobot offered, "It was contingent upon our signing the treaty with your government that they relinquish their claim to you as a US citizen. I assure you that it was not easy to presuade them to let you go."

"Is that what you did to piss them off?" he whispered from between unmoving lips, his momentarily stunned mind coughing back to life and beginning to sort through everything that had been said, looking for a loop hole, a way out.

"My manner of presuasion was, I believe, the true cause of the uproar," If Sam had been inclined to care, he would have laughed at the fact that Optimus actually sounded _embarassed_. "According to Cybertronian custom, it is my right to assert my claim to you, resorting to combat if necessary. When they first balked at the idea of revoking your citizenship, I demanded to know who, ultimately, held the loyalty of all citizens," his tone dipped, growing sly, "I was informed that, in theory, the person through whom all citizenship is confirmed is the President."

The revelation jostled Sam from his funk. Not the fact that American loyalty, as a technical term rather than a feeling, extended to the president. No, he was startled that Optimus had actually gone all the way up to the _President _to screw him over. That took some serious dedication. But then he mind caught up with the implications of the rest of his admission, and he choked on his own spit.

"'Combat'?" He repeated, incredulous, "You would have fought the President for me? Like, with your bodies and not with words or an exchange of lawsuits or something?"

"Most likely it would not have come to that."

"Oh. Well good." Then, "Only 'most likely'? As in, there's a .01% chance you might have?"

Optimus rumbled a laugh. "Their reaction was very similar to yours. Although I issued no threat, my popularity in Washington has declined somewhat in these past few days.

A rush of hate pounded through him for a moment at the fact that Optimus seemed to find the whole thing to be slightly amusing. There was nothing funny about any part of the situation. Nothing at all.

"It doesn't matter," he spat bitterly, then, replaying his own turn of phrase in his head, repeated with some measure of hope, "It doesn't matter. See, I may not be a citizen anymore, but that won't stop me from going back there. --Unless of course you _'presuaded' _them not to let me over the border."

"No, I did not." All the humor abruptly faded from Optimus' voice, "Whatever you may be inclined to think of me at the moment, I did not request that the United States revoke your citizenship in order to force you to comply with my wishes. Rather, you could not simultaneously be under the jurisdiction of the Autobots and the United States at the same time."

The preplexing revelation washed over him like a bucket of ice water to the face, instantly cooling his boiling anger.

"Okay, now you lost me."

"Having you reside at NEST will provide some measure of protection against the Decepticons. Changing your political status from private citizen to human ambassador to the Autobots will provide you with the necessary diplomatic immunity to protect you against others of your kind."

His jaw fell slack and dropped to his knees. "'Ambassador'?" he parroted breathlessly.

"On paper, in any case. Putting you under our protection as an honorary Cybertronian is a necessary step to keeping you from the hands of people who would turn you over to the Decepticons without a second thought. This way, no one on earth can attempt to hold you against your will without serious intergalactic complications." Optimus hesitated, then sighed through the vents (another act, all an act, pretending to be less alien). "I apologize if I have caused you any undue distress by not revealing my plans until now. I had hoped to allow you a week more of a relatively normal existence without having to worry about the coming changes in your future."

Logic whistled and cheered, tactlessly informing him that he should be thrilled to have a safety net of protection in place for when he re-entered a world turned against him. And on some levels he was. Not only would he get to get to be with Bumblebee again (my friend, my--, my-- what?), he wouldn't have to pace his room at three am, restlessly moving to stare out at the sky from every window in the house, looking for the jet from his nightmares riding steadily closer on the air. And what kid didn't squeal and jump up and down at the thought of being practically adopted by uber-cool alien robots?

But he wasn't a kid anymore. And his inner child had been shot to death in all the days leading up to Mission city as he learned that not all monsters were big and ugly (how could they keep hurting him? How could they sneer and spit at the gentle alien writhing under their guns?How could they keep cutting him with those _knives _as he squealed in agony, strapped to a concrete slab?). He was 18. He didn't want to play make believe anymore-- he wanted to grow up, go to college, get a degree, get a good job, marry Mikaela and end up with six dozen kids, a house in the suburbs and a big dog.

But now, none of it would come to pass. His own country had given him away; he was owned by a group of aliens with powers that verged on godly. He couldn't go back to college, because the Decepticons might find him and kill him. He couldn't go back to his own house, because the Decepticons might find him and kill him. He couldn't go hide under an overpass, because a random stranger might find him, knock him over the head with a rock, and give him to the Decepticons, who would kill him.

And he couldn't go crash on Mikaela's couch, because the Decepticons might find him and hurt girlfriend to get to him.

"So. NEST, huh? Do they have cable? Or air conditioning?"

By this time the medicine had mostly worn off, but as he pulled his knees to his chest he started to giggle a little anyway. (can't go home can't go home)

Optimus gave a bewildered little click, but replied, "Yes. On both counts."

"Do they have a couch or something I could sleep on? I'm not too sure I want to bunk with a bunch of Marines-- I've never been a glutten for punishment."

Tiny, spasmodic shakes like the scrawling lines of a seismograph worked their way across his shoulders and down his back, crawling along his arms and legs, wedging themselves into his hands and feet. (no more dumpy room, no more mojo, no more seeing Dad working on his grass)

"A couch would not be sufficient in the long term. You will find that a room as been prepared for your arrival, one that you do not have to share with any of the soldiers living part time on base."

"Wow. You really do like to plan ahead, don't you?"

His clothes may have still been slightly damp, but the warm air drifting from the vents should have ensured that he would not be the slightest bit cold. And yet his skin felt like ice-- utterly pale and clammy with sweat. (no more Miles, no more visits to the lake, no more annoying Trent, no more of his mom's disasterous cooking)

Instead of answering his rhetorical question, Optimus asked, "Sam, are you alright?", as if such a thing as 'alright' was even remotely possible under the circumstances.

"No, I'm not alright!" he snapped, fisting his good hand so he wouldn't have to watch his fingers tremble (no more of Dad's stupid pranks, no more Saturday morning waffles, no more shakes at the Wendy's down the street). He gulped down a few swallows of air, trying to get himself under control. He felt like a ball God had kicked way up into the clouds-- he had no idea where he would land, or even if he would land safely. "Will I at least get visiting privileges?" He asked sarcastically, naive enough to half expect the alien leader to reply, 'Of course, Sam.'

"Unfortunately, that will not be possible," Optimus refused him instead, though not unkindly. "The risk of the Decepticons discovering our whereabouts would be significantly higher if passenger craft were seen going frequently to and from NEST headquarters."

(no more Mikaela, no more Mom, no more Dad, no more Mojo, no more Miles-- no more home, no more home, no more home, no more home, no more home)

"It's always always _always_ the Decepticons!" he shouted, voice emerging slightly strangled. "I can't sleep at night because of them! My best friend seems dead half the time because of them! I can't go to college because of them! And NOW you tell me I'll never see my family or my girl friend because of the _Decepticons_-- I'll never, ever get to see them again, because if I get within a hundred miles of them they might get MURDERED by a Decepticon!"

His face screwed up so tightly in pain that the muscles began to scream; he sunk his head into his hands. "For all the time I'll get to see them before I die, I might as well already be DEAD!"

During their almost hour long discussion, Optimus had not once moved. But at his carelessly flung assertion, the engine turned over, the head lights came on, and the peterbilt abruptly lurched into motion. Jarred upright by the unexpected movement, Sam peered through the windshield, seeing nothing but a dense wall of mist illuminated from the twin beams of powerful light coming from Optimus. Shapes rose and fell beyond the shimmering curtain as Optimus drove forward-- a jet, a fuel hose, another jet-- making it difficult to discern where they were heading. He had the feeling, however, that Optimus was driving towards the side of the ship rather than down its length.

"What's going on?"

Optimus didn't answer.

He leaned forward for a better view out the front window, watching the metal decking roll away beneath them-- and suddenly the edge of the ship loomed into view, beyond which lay a hundred foot cliff into the ocean. His heart started to beat faster.

"Optimus, what are you doing?"

The edge of the ship rolled swiftly closer, and the Peterbilt showed no signed of turning.

"Optimus, you're heading for the side!"

Still no answer, but the seat belt took on a life of its own and slithered down over his shoulder, clicking into place.

Five feet. The truck wasn't slowling down.

"Optimus!"

Three feet. One.

--and the front axel of the truck lurched out into open space. Sam screamed as the cab tipped precariously, nose tilting down to give him an intimate view of the roaring waters so far below. He clutched at the seat belt, pressing his body so tightly back against the seat as though he could somehow melt through it. His feet scrabbled at the floorboard, finding no purchase.

His heart tried to beat itself out of his chest as the whole truck creaked, shuddered, and finally stopped tipping forward, leaving them balanced precariously on the edge of the ship, gazing down into certain death. The yellow head lights cut a shining swath from the night air, reminding him of that scene from Jurrasic Park where the trailer, lights still ablaze, had dangled from a tree just before falling and crashing into the forest floor a thousand feet below.

For several extraordinarily tense minutes, he continued to cringe away from the windshield, expecting at any moment to die as the truck slipped the rest of the way and sent them hurtling into the water. But when his mind caught up with his instincts, he realized that he was not inside of a truck-- he was inside of a _transformer_. If Optimus did not want to go for a swim, his Peterbilt disguise would not fall. The whole thing was merely a demonstration, an act for his benefit (or detriment. He couldn't get behind the benefit thing when said robot was attempting to frighten him to death).

"Judging from your reaction," the Autobot began in a clipped tone, "I would have to conclude that you do not, in fact, want to die."

"Of course I don't want to die!" Sam wailed hysterically, wondering what fruity alien thought processes would have lead him to believe that he did. But then he thought back to his previous outburst through the still lingering haze of near-death terror, and he realized why the Autobot had believed he would.

Optimus cut him off before he could open his mouth. "Maybe not right now, at this moment, when faced with the actual fact, but merely suggesting that 'I might as well be dead!'--" Sam flinched, hearing his own wild voice wail through the speakers. Had he really sounded that desperate, that lost? "--implies that you have given it at least a minimum of thought."

"So what?" He came back defiantly, now confident enough that Optimus wasn't really trying to off him to challenge the Autobot, despite the fact that he was still plastered to the seat back. "It's my life! Or are you going to tell me that it isn't any more?"

Optimus clicked quietly to himself for a while, then said, much more calmly (how could he know that the Autobot had been so tense?), "I have observed you to be a very warm-hearted, caring, and generous being. But to try to take your own life, or to recklessly throw it away, would be extraordinarily selfish."

"How? It would only affect me!"

Instead of answering, a holographic screen opened up and covered the windshield, blocking out the lonely night. Familiar faces, familiar events, began to flash brightly over the intangible surface: Mikaela kissing him after Mission City, Bumblebee requesting to be his guardian, his parents hugging him with tearful faces on the desert floor, and so many other moments he had forgotten but that warmed him to the core. And from the speakers began to drift a jumble of voices, weaving around him as if in a dream: 'I'm glad I got in that car with you', 'I will go where ever you go, Sam', 'I'm not leaving you! I'm not leaving you!', 'Don't you dare die on me, Sam!'-- his family, his girl friend, his guardian, and even Rachet and Ironhide, all talking to or about _him_, all saying in some small, indefinable way, 'We love you.'

Listening to the affirmations of affection, watching the continuous stream of his friends and family holding him, calling for him, fighting for him, with a loyalty that brought him to his knees, he realized that Optimus was right. If he ended up killing himself or getting himself killed, he would not be the only one to suffer. He couldn't quite believe that they wouldn't be able to go on with their lives without him, but Optimus' message was clear-- if you die, they will die too.

Unable to bear seeing emotion so pure, so strong it was almost painful any longer, Sam closed his eyes and bowed his head. Immediately, the recordings went silent and the holo screen darkened away. When he opened his eyes, he came face to face with the foreboding darkness once more. The ocean hissed and roared. Like Megatron.

"I guess I see your point," he chuckled weakly. But once more his heart was drawn to Mikaela and the chuckle died. "I love her, Optimus." He refused to believe the statement sounded like a plea. "She's....well, she's my girl friend. The girl friend/ boy friend thing doesn't work out too well over long distances, especially without the possibility of parole." He worried his bottom lip. "If I somehow became selfish enough to ask her to leave her life behind, could she come stay with me? You know, permenantly."

"Though you probably no longer believe me at this point, I _am_ sorry, Sam. As our ward you have full clearance to live on base. Mikaela does not," Optimus paused, as though debating whether or not to continue. Apprently he decided against it, because the next moment the truck shifted into reverse and pulled its front axel back onto the deck with a jaw-rattling bump. Backing far enough away from the edge to turn around, Optimus drove back the way they had come.

Sam blinked, surprised, to find the truck pulled up beside the observation tower only a few seconds later. It had seemed like a much longer drive on the way out, but he supposed that on the return trip he was sufficiently distracted by his own thoughts not to accurately mark the passage of time. The door popped open, creating a straight line of freedom from the interior of the cab to the door through which he had come (had it only been an hour?). But the seatbelt had not retracted, and Sam could sense Optimus hestitating again, having an internal fight with himself.

Feeling like an ass for how he had treated Optimus when the guy was only trying to help him, Sam reached out and lightly set a hand on the dash.

"You can tell me. I promise I won't go spreading rumors," he tried to joke. It was obviously the wrong tactic to use, because the Autobot leader immediately sealed up like a clam.

"Get some rest, Sam," he advised wearily, unlatching the seat belt and sucking it back into the wall. For a moment the Autobot paused, the constant, sub-aural whirring of his internal mechanisms deepening in tone the way Bumblebee's did when scanning. "And give Bumblebee the chance to talk to you."

"I did!" He defended himself, hopping down from the cab. "I sent him almost a hundred e-mails, but he's been blocking me."

"Ah." Whirl. "Then I should probably tell you that he's been following you ever since you left the cargo bay."

Sam's steps faltered to a halt. He swung around to face the disguised transformer.

"He's been following me? How? Some of those corridors around the infirmary are really tiny, and the twins had trouble just fitting into a stair well!"

"Yes, the infamous antics of the twins," Optimus said, his normally level voice coming as close to a growl as Sam had ever heard it, tone midnight black. He shivered, suddenly understanding what Mikaela had been talking about and praying that he never encountered a truly pissed Optimus. "You forget that the twins are merely battlefield soliders while Bumblebee is a skilled and highly trained scout. If he does not want you to know that he is following you, you will never know."

The night had only grown cooler as the fog rolled in-- Sam wrapped his arms around himself, grimacing as he realized that his jacket was soaked though. It was like swimming, but with air.

"Did he try to follow me out here?"

"He _did_ follow you out here. He was very upset when I began to drive towards the edge of the ship. At that point, I had to order him back inside."

Thinking of the way Optimus had been able to stealthily watch him from the observation tower, he shivered with awe at the thought that Bee was about a hundred times sneakier. He hadn't even realized the yellow bot was _there_. It was a very good thing, he reflected, that the Autobots were on their side.

"Oh." Realizing that he was just standing there awkwardly, he turned to go back inside. "Well, 'night."

"Good night."

And that was that, he supposed. Though just before he let the door back into the ship fall closed in his wake, he peeked back out at Optimus, who had not moved. Strange how a truck could seem so sad. Somehow he knew that it had nothing to do with their painful encounter, but something even more painful, something the Autobot had twice come so close to telling him. But then the metal door clanged back into place, harsh flourescent light blotting out the memory of night. And Optimus was left alone in the dark.

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9 o'clock. Far too early for any self-respecting teenager to be thinking about sleep. Yet after a horribly twisted day, Sam wanted to do nothing more than to climb into bed, pull the covers up over his head and tell himself that monsters didn't really exist until he believed it enough to get to sleep. No question about it-- informing his parents that they would never get to see their baby boy again could wait until the next day. Preferably at a saner hour than 5:13. 10am sounded good, as did 2 pm and never.

Updating them on the fact that he had broken his arm couldn't wait, however. If he put it off, it would only raise searching questions about where he had been and what he had been doing. He could stretch the time he spent in the infirmary and make it three hours while still sounding believable. Twelve hours, however, would be a different story.

...But maybe he could put it off just a little longer. Four hours, the perfect length of time if one of the broken bones had stabbed through his flesh and needed to be set back in place with surgery. Plenty of time to flush Bumblebee out of the wood work and bring him out of his funk. There were a whole other set of issues he needed to thrash out with the scout. In retrospect, he seemed to be doing a lot of thrashing in general that night.

Turning a 90 degree corner where one hallway t-boned into another, Sam paced about fifteen feet down the corridor, pulled off one shoe, selected the right branch of the hallway at random and cried out, "Oh no! My shoe!" Sounded totally fake, but hopefully it would get the job done. He tossed his shoe at the back wall of the T shape, angling it so that it bounced into the right hand side of the corridor just out of sight. He waited, damp, cold, and shoeless, hoping that he had chosen correctly. Just when it seemed like he might have entirely misjudged the situation, the shoe came flying silently back into view, tumbling to a stop only a few feet away from him.

Grinning in triumph, Sam picked up the returned shoe and slid it back onto his foot.

"Alright, Bee. I know you're there. So come on out with your hands up!"

The scout neither answered nor deigned to slink into view, though he surely must have known Sam was waiting for him. He crushed the thought that his yellow friend had fled back the way he had come after chucking his shoe. If he had, Sam would hunt him down. He l- cared about him too much to let whatever was going on continue for much longer.

But at long last, Bumblebee gave up on his empty space impression and crept around the corner. The hallway seemed hardly large enough to fit three strapping men abrest, yet somehow the Cybertronian scout made the lithe crouching, flowing motion of his hunched stride seem like a fluid dance. Regardless of any lack of physcial space, he didn't seem crowded at all.

"Sam." The robot greeted, turning towards him with his arms held behind his back. Sam wondered about that-- was it to help him slip through small spaces, or was he carrying something with him he didn't want the human to see?

"That was too easy," he accused gently, "You knew I wanted to talk to you and let me find you out."

"Yes," Bee admitted, crouching down to be on eye level with him, though he remained a careful distance away, out of arms reach. "I overheard the last portion of your conversation with Optimus."

"But not the rest of it?"

"He had sealed his cab against sensor intrusion. He knew I was watching."

The suspicion that perhaps Bumblebee didn't know Optimu's plan tickled the back of his mind. "Do you already know what, ah, what Optimus has arranged? About me, I mean. Me and what's going to happen in the next few days."

"I do. As does Rachet. But we were both sworn to secrecy."

A revelation dawned on him, and Sam snapped his fingers. "Oh duh! That's what they were arguing about, wasn't it? Optimus and Rachet, I mean, while doing the video conference shtick earlier."

"Yes," Bumblebee shifted, leaning forward slightly, then yanking himself away. As if he were afraid. As if he were restraining himself. "Rachet has grown fearful about the impact your state of mind has been having on your body. He was of the opinion that Optimus should tell you sooner rather than later. Optimus disagreed."

Sam found himself becoming lost in Bumblebee's shining blue optics, leaning closer and closer as if to peer through their depths and into his soul. And then he shook himself, remembering Optimus' chilling tale of what had occured to the scout. Suddenly he didn't want to see what ghosts lingered behind Bumblebee's eyes. To distract himself, he turned his face away, hugging himself through his wet clothes, and asked, "What about you? What side of the table were you on?"

Bumblebee didn't answer him. His gaze followed Sam's arms, lingered on his cast, and sharpened to a diamond-edged alertness as a tiny shiver passed through his frame. He shifted forward again with the same tightly leashed and vaguely frightening intensity, then stopped whatever he had planned to do, changed his mind, and brought his arms out from behind his back-- drawing with them a fuzzy yellow blanket.

Sam's face cracked into a smile and he laughed, delighted, at the sight of the faded yellow fabric worn impossibly soft with age.

"Awe, Bee! Come on, I'm not that cold!"

"But you are wet," the scout pointed out, "Which will exacerbate the problem."

Sam held himself forcibly still as Bumblebee did a little hop-step forward and brought the blanket towards him. His earlier terror, though mostly erased, had not entirely dissapated. Despite his ferrocious mental commands, his body acted against his orders and bent away from the approaching hands and the length of yellow softness draped between them (...tortured him for three weeks...tore out his vocalizer-- a feral claw pinning him with metallic strength, cannon charging up for an annihilating blast, the friendly Bee consumed by the cruel Hornet that cared for nothing but survival--).

Picking up on the motion, Bumblebee froze, then unwillingly began to retreat, emitting wave after wave of cloying sorrow and shame. Sam wasn't going to stand for that.

"Nu-uh. No way. We are not going to do this staying away from each other thing, because its only been a few hours and I'm already sick of it." He stepped forward, hardening his muscles-- don't flinch, damnit!-- and demanded, "I want my blanket. You were right, I am cold. And I don't think I'm supposed to get this cast wet--" Bumblebee's optics once more slipped to his plastered arm, "--so thank you. Thank you for being the most thoughtful guardian ever and bringing me a blanket so I wouldn't have to be cold."

The impossibly blue optics snapped back to his face, and though they couldn't widen with surprise, the yellow scout was obviously taken aback by his astuteness. Either that, or he was just pissed at Optimus for telling Sam all his secret fears. But Sam liked to think it was the first one.

"You scare me when you won't talk to me," he admitted, thinking it was time the therapy-circle story-telling went both ways, "People who start giving me the silent treatment for so long are usually pissed enough at me to try to push me out in front of a bus."

Bumblebee emitted a faint hissing noise that seemed almost pained. "I was not pissed at you, Sam," he replied softly, lowering his face even closer to the human, "If anything I was pissed at myself. --And I would crush any bus before it had the chance to hit you."

Not giving his human a chance to react to this wierdly intense declaration, Bumblebee reached out and lightly settled the blanket around his shoulders like a cape, tugging the ends closed in the front. His giant fingers lingered there for an instant, touching the place over his heart as though to assure himself of its steady rythm. When he moved to pull back, Sam set his good hand on top of Bee's and awkwardly patted the metal finger (don't cringe don't cringe, it's only a hand not a cannon).

"Then why _did_ you snub me when I tried to text you and then block my messages? For that matter, why didn't you bother to e-mail me back? Your inbox must be filled to bursting by now."

Bumblebee carefully extracted his hand from Sam's grip, taking two large steps away from him. Sam instantly felt colder. It seemed almost as if the scout were putting space between them not to set him at ease, but to prevent himself from doing...something. As with Optimus, he got the feeling that Bumblebee was holding something back, holding it back by only a fragile thread frayed to the breaking point.

Instead of directly answering his question, Bee replied, "I was watching you while you were in the infirmary, Sam. But you should know that when the doctor drew your blood and set your arm, I had to retreat some distance away. So when you called me the first time, I was not in the best frame of mind.

Cuddling down a little in the blanket (don't sniff it, don't look like you're crazy enough to miss Bee's scent), he hazarded a guess at the reason behind his friend's strange behavior.

"What, are you afraid of blood?"

"No," he paused, weighing his words, then stared at him intently as he said, "I was afraid I might lose control and hurt someone."

Ice slid down his spine. "Hurt me?" he gasped a little, not willing to admit how much that terrified him.

"No. The doctor."

Bumblebee slunk further down the corridor. Just before he disappeared out of sight, he ducked his head back around the corner, shut down one of his optics in an imitation of a reassuring wink, and commented, "You might want to check your voice mail. Mikaela's called you fourteen times in the last ten minutes."

And then the scout was gone. Vanished into the air until he again wanted to be seen.

Sam pulled out his phone and checked it. It was still on. He had fourteen missed calls.

And though the little device had not been set to vibrate, never once had it begun to ring.

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Author's note: Hoo boy. This was a long one. Forgive my massive amounts of spewage that have turned this chapter into a raging monster. I had a point I wanted to get to, and by God, I was going to get to it. Forgive my lateness in posting this thing-- as you can see by how long it is, it took me the better part of two days to write. Sam's conversation with Optimus just kept getting longer, and longer....and longer....

I apologize if Sam comes across as a whiny, PMSing brat here, but this is kind of the tipping point for him and he needed this page space to finally shout himself hoarse.

Additionally, I feel the need to add that his is NOT a Sam/Bee or Sam/Optimus romantic pairing. The word love can refer to other things besides sex, people.

Now that the author's note is done, you guys will have to excuse me as I step up on my soap box for a moment. ::Cue Soap Box::

As you can see, this chapter mentions suicide. Though I will not turn Sam suicidal in this story, I want to take this opprotunity to impart an import message upon anyone out there who is currently considering suicide. I know, as a family member of someone who has taken their own life, how devastating such an act can be. Several years ago, my uncle decided that life was not worth living and blew his brains out. He left behind a mother who cried over him at his funeral, a woman so strong that I have never seen her cry before or since, and three brothers who are haunted to this day by his death. I never really even had the chance to know him. So if you are wondering if death would not be a better option, stop and think; if there is anyone, any one at all, that you care about-- parent, sibling, friend, neighbor, the gorcery store bag boy-- consider what their reaction would be to your death. You will be leaving behind more pain and sorrow than you will be taking away.

::End soap box::


	8. Revelations

WARNING: This chapter contains scenes involving vigorous kissing, though no explicit content. If making out bothers you, don't read the next to last portion between the lines of 'N's.

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Mikaela was, in Sam's less-than-expert opinion, the ideal girl friend; hot face and body (both requirements), funny, intelligent, kind enough to take pity on a hopeless geek, and generally laid back.

Unlike some of the eye candy he had craved in his earlier years, Mikaela turned out to be the perfect combination of someone who neither treated him like a disposable dish rag nor clung to him with obsessive neediness. They frequently hung out together, sure. But on those times when they both craved their space or simply wanted to do different things, they parted with a friendly 'See you later', never once falling into the trap of texting the other person every three seconds to check up on them. So the fact that Mikaela had called him fourteen times in the last ten minutes meant that something had gone wrong, something serious enough that she had broken the unspoken rule of never calling more than once an hour when separated.

Clouded over with the ominous feeling of impending doom, Sam pushed the button to play the recorded messages and brought the blackberry to his ear. Mikaela's voice emerged from the speaker tinged with equal parts exasperation and urgency.

_"Sam, I know you must be busy with Optimus, but I really need you to call me back. Rachet's thinking about doing something very stupid."_

*Beep*

_"Like, _now_, would be good. He's still not listening to me."_

*Beep*

_"--no, wait! Urgh!" _Her voice came through muffled; her head must have been turned away from the phone. _"--Sam, you need to call me back. Rachet says that he contacted Optimus and that you're not with him any more. Why aren't you answering your phone?"_

*Beep*

_"Seriously, this isn't funny, Sam. Rachet wanted to examine your arm himself, but when he couldn't find you in the infirmary he-- Ugh! Look, just pick up the stupid phone and call!"_

*Beep*

_"Alright. You want to play it this way? Fine." _Her voice changed from weirdly calm to sugary sweet. _"Rachet called your parents to try to find you, but obviously you weren't with them. So now they're on the war path against the Autobots to find out where you are and how you broke your arm---"_

Not bothering to listen to the rest of the messages, Sam ended the recording, stuffed the blackberry back into his pocket and took off at a stumbling sprint down the hallway. With any luck he would hopefully be able to reach the cargo bay before his parents could start laying into the Autobots and discover more than he was ready for them to know. But the way his luck seemed to be going, coupled with the fact that it was difficult to get up any speed when practically dead from exhaustion and trying to hold a blanket around his shoulders with one hand (Bumblebee in fabric form-- a soft, enveloping shield), there was no way he could make it.

The hallways lengthened to spite him; the stairwells all spontaneously switched direction to point only up instead of down. In his urgency, he skidded around several wrong turns before stumbling onto the correct route leading to his destination in the bowels of the ship. The trip grew longer every time he made it-- when he at last descended the final stairwell, he was certain he should have run out of ship ages ago at his hurried pace.

Turning onto the long, empty corridor leading to the human-sized entrance to the cargo bay, Sam noticed with some amount of shock that the two gun-toting guards were conspiciously absent. Without their continued presence, any random person could wander in and harass the Autobots. His teeth clenched together at the breach of security-- the Autobots had saved all of humanity, so the least the small slice of humanity aboard the ship could do was protect their privacy. Had the situation not been so desperate, and had Sam not been too tired to really care, he might have turned around at once and marched off to find someone in charge he could bitch at. As it was, he slowed to a lilting, shuffling gait, pulled the yellow blanket higher up around his shoulders (an unorthodox superman, strong enough to take on the world and his parents combined), and marched down the hallway.

Super-Sam would have burst without hesitation through the door, as prideful as someone wearing a yellow fuzzy blanket could be. But Super-Sam's alter ego, Sam, was not so bold or brave, and paused to look through the tiny rectangle of glass in the door rather than immediately announce his presence. All he could see from his less-than-steller vantage point were the backs of Ironhide's legs. The discussion/heated argument/epic battle must have been located around the corner. Suddenly he was glad he couldn't see what was occuring at the moment; the fact that the weapon's specialist felt the need to transform conveyed multitudes, most of which radiated bad vibes to the tune of 'they are Not Happy and showing it'.

Straightening his spine for his coming transformation into the Rumpled Wonder (insert trademark), Sam eased open the door and crept into the cavernous space beyond.

_"--you guys really shouldn't let your piping get all clogged up like that! It's irresponsible!"_

_"Judy..."_

_"I'm very serious! If every time you fart you blow away half the ceiling you need to be more careful about what you eat!"_

_"Honey, they're robots. I really don't think they eat."_

_"What else could have caused a hole like that?"_

Oh God-- _Mom_.

Not quite sure whether to giggle like a six year old or crawl into a hole in shame, Sam paced in a wide circle around behind Ironhide, taking stock of which Autobots, exactly, he would no longer be able to show his face around. Though on some level he had expected it, Optimus' absence took him by surprise. While of course it was brainless to assume that the alien leader had rushed inside right on his heels and darted back down into the cargo bay with his compatriots, it was unnerving to see the other Autobots arrayed around his parents without the steadying presence of their leader. Rachet seemed more likely to make embarassing declarations of bodily functions, Ironhide seemed more likely to shoot first and ask questions later, and the Twins...well, the Twins would have acted just the same as always even if God were in the room breathing down their necks.

Bumblebee was missing too. Without him, Super-sam didn't feel quite so super anymore.

To his surprise, he found the displaced guards standing a respectful distance away from the loose circle of Autobots, accompanied by a thoroughly disgruntled Thatcher. The General's presence in the room bewildered him-- why did he feel the need to stand witness to his parents raging about his broken arm to the Autobots? Since they were only grumbling and not shouting, he assumed that they could not yet know about his abrupt shift in nationality (no more Tranquility, no more California, no more America--).

Shaking his head and deciding that he might as well just bite the bullet and get it all over with, Sam rasied his voice and called out, "Just a fart wouldn't have _nearly_ enough power. At least a few flying projectiles must have been invovled, if you know what I mean."

Nine pairs of eyes turned in his direction. But only his parents jumped in surprise. Naturally, the aliens had sensed his arrival even before he had stepped through the door. And he assumed Thatcher and his thugs were born stoic.

"Sam! Where've _you_ been, young man?"

"There you are, Sam! What happened to your arm, sweety? Are you okay?"

"He's fine, Judy. At least until I get through with him."

His mother smacked the back of one hand into her husband's chest.

"Ron! Cut the boy some slack, will you? He's obviously working through some tough issues here."

"Working through them by breaking his arm. How productive."

'Tough issues'. Heh. Sam almost smiled at how completely inadequate those two words were.

"You haven't even given him the chance to explain--"

"As stimulating as this conversation is," Rachet interjected suddenly, "Now that Sam is present I would like the chance to examine his injured appendage for myself. If you will excuse me--"

And the neon Autobot stepped right over the top of his gaping parents, closing the gap to his quarry in two fluid strides.

Being rapidly approached by a twenty foot tall war machine, no matter how friendly and well meaning the war machine, had an intimidation factor that could put a snarling tiger to shame. Especially when said war machine was far from the traditional definition of 'friendly'. Rachet, despite his profession (designation? programming?) as a medic, lacked even the most basic people skills, making him arguably the most 'alien' of the bunch. And stripped as he was of all sense of personal boundaries and social appropriateness, he had no qualms about examining whoever he wanted wherever he wanted, regardless of their wishes.

Knowing that he would be fighting a losing battle if he tried to resist, Sam passively surrendered control of his coccooned limb to the spidery fingers that ginerly plucked it away from his body. Rachet squatted down on his haunches beside the human, bringing his large head close to the captured body part, studying it with intense blue optics. So close to the robot, Sam noticed that his optics were dissimilar from those of the other Autobots in every manner except color. The lens-like rings framing the camera pupil numbered litterally into the _thousands_, with some so slim they might have been the width of a hair. Unconciously, Sam found himself leaning closer to study the intricate arrangement of parts beneath the glass hemisphere-- the continual clicking and rotating of every delicate piece created a ripple effect in the quiet blue glow, as if viewing the reflection of a pool of water.

Several quiet, furious chirps came from the medic, causing Sam to jerk his head back-- he had been leaning so far forward their noses were only an inch away from touching. He looked around at the assembled Autobots, wondering which one Rachet was snarling at in Cybertronian; when none reacted to the static blips, he realized that robots could, in fact, mumble to themselves.

"Hey, you!" His mother shouted, stalking angrily towards Rachet and pointing a threatening finger, "What are you doing to my son?"

Without pausing to look up at her, the medic replied, "Assesing the condition of his injury."

"No offence, Snatch-it (honestly, what strange names you all have!), but you're an alien AND a robot! You don't know the first thing about us humans! --and I'll bet the rest of my vacation in Paris that you've never gone to medical school, either!" she accused in her shrill, mom-on-a-protective-rampage voice. Though neither his face nor posture suggested that he had been insulted, Rachet halted his scans for long enough to turn his piercing gaze on the advancing woman.

With the air of a man trying to diffuse a bomb, his father came forward and carefully drew her away. "I don't think he's had time to take night classes, Judy. Besides, Sam's a big boy-- if something hurts he's got enough brains to say 'no'." Though his words were soothing and edged with humor, he threw a black glare of his own at Rachet, one that went completely unnoticed as the medic bent once more over Sam's arm.

As if to extend a peace offering to the glowering pair of humans, the Cybertronian rumbles switched abruptly to english. Rachet's manner of speech, however, gave the impression that he was merely continuing an internal thought rather than addressing his unwilling patient (or any watching parents) directly. "Stable fractures in both the radius and ulna-- fortunately no stray bone splinters." He rotated the captured arm a precise 45 degrees. "A significant amount of swelling around the affected area. Non-malignant bacteria present in the tissue. White blood cell count elevated but not beyond acceptable parameters. Heart rate and blood pressure above normal, unusually high levels of adrenaline, vasopressin and cortisol present in the blood stream."

Gingerly returning the arm to Sam's side as though replacing a Ming vase on a shelf, Rachet leaned in even closer. "I judge that you are stressed. May I inquire as to the reason?"

"Ain't it obvious, Hachet?" Cackled the unmistakable voice of Skids from somewhere above them. Sam gave himself whiplash as he followed the words to their source, finding the lime green Autobot perched atop the stack of packing crates towering over them like a wannabe sky scraper. He must have moved during the impromptu check-up. "Yo ugly mug would scare a decepticon inta becomin a _toasta_!"

"So back da hell up!" Mudflap added helpfully, poking his head around Ironhide to wave his hand at Rachet in a shooing motion.

As though suddenly reminded of the twin's presence, Ironhide flung himself around in the direction of the candy-apple Autobot and swung his heavily plated arm into the other's back, knocking him out into the open. The smaller robot's efforts to scamper away were hindered as Ironhide pinned him to the floor with one foot, the violent motion causing his parents to scramble back from the epicenter.

"_You _two should be entirely absorbed with repairing the damage to the cargo bay, not sneaking around and making pit-damned nuisances of yourselves," Ironhide growled.

"Come on! Have a heart, Bruce Willis!" Mudflap whined, struggling without noticable effect against the much larger robot, "We didn't put that big ass hole in da ceiling! Stumblebee should be in here fixin it!"

"And if you had not been involved in ineffectual information-gathering tactics, there wouldn't _be_ anything to fix in the first place." The black Autobot leaned in close to his trapped prey, voice dipping into a gravely barritone. "Prime may not be a believer in having the punishment fit the crime, but Prime also isn't here right now. And I have no problem using you for target practice."

Then, feeling that he had made his point, Ironhide lifted his foot, gave Mudflap a prefunctory kick in the side, and stepped away. Faster than a bullet loosed form the barrel of a gun, the red Autobot shot across the room to rejoin his twin, all the while muttering a surly stream of, "I'm goin! I'm goin!" Once he felt himself sufficiently out of range, however, he lifted a defiant middle finger at the weapon's specialist. "Slagger!" he added, just before ducking out of sight.

His parents, momentarily stunned by the exchange, slowly came out of their stupor as Ironhide retreated back to his regular position. But their eyes continued to drift to his tank-like cannons, which hummed and clicked ominously as he folded his arms across his wide chest.

His mother, to Sam's growing anxiety, began to mouth the word 'Stumblebee' as though wondering where she had heard it before. His father, luckily, only turned to spear Thatcher with a hard look. "Are they normally like this, or does the insanity escalate on wednesdays?"

Firming her lips, his mom smacked him on the arm. "Ron! Don't be rude."

"What?! Am I the only one here to think the fact that a _hole_ appeared in the ceiling-- a hole which is still smoking, by the way-- is just a little strange? And, I don't know, _insane_?"

Thatcher's mouth thinned into something resembling a watered down grimace, and he cleared his throat in preparation to speak. Sam' level of adrenaline (already high, according to Rachet) spiked off the chart. This was it. Thatcher would calmy explain to his parents that Bumblebee had shot him out of an overhead vent, his mother would gibber, his father would explode in outrage, and both would immediately demand that the Autobots stay far away from their son and never attempt to contact him again-- which would lead to the inevitable revelation that Autobots had claimed Sam as their own and thus would not stay far away from him...which would lead to the fact that he would not be getting on a plane with his family in two days' time to return home (cry and wave goodbye, see you only in my dreams).

Sam couldn't deal with all that. Not right then. Not ever.

He jumped to cut off the General, striding quickly forward to insert himself into the center of attention. "Insane, yes. Definitly, postively insane. Just plain wonky. But that's okay, cause they're new here and I'm sure if some of us went to a different planet they'd all think _we_ were insane. But hey! At least no one was hurt, right? No harm, no foul, and all that?" He swung his good arm around his mother's shoulders and grinned at his father (don't look too close, you'll see all the cracks, see the endless dark beyond). "So! Now that you've found me-- or, I guess I found you, but whatever-- we can go and all get some sleep, because sleep is majorly awesome and good for healing bones and all that."

Thatcher shot him a decidedly cool look, then turned to address his father. "In answer to your question, Mr. Witwiky--" (no, stop!) "--today has been an unusual day in more ways than one. Unforseen events occured which lead to the accidental defacement of some parts of the cargo bay, though I assure you steps are being taken to rectify the situation." Though he didn't glance towards Mudflap and Skids, the implication of who, exactly, had been pegged for clean-up duty was clear. But knowing something of the twins' personalities, Sam seriously doubted and true 'rectifying' would get done.

"Sooo....how's that going?" Sam leapt to fill up the empty air with words, fill it up with nonsense to suffocate the truth. "Did the-- whatever made that hole wreck anything on the upper floors?" Then, something he had not considered before occured to him, something truly awful, "No one was hurt, right? Please tell me no one was hurt."

He sensed Rachet's head whipping in his direction to stare at him intently, but he ignored the revealing gaze, concentrating instead on the lump of lead that had spontaneous formed in his gut. His arm dropped from around his mother's shoulders.

"No. Fortunately, the blast was contained to the crawl space between the cargo bay and the level above it, resulting only in damage to inanimate objects--" steel-gray eyes darted to the conspicous cast as though it were a neon sign in Vegas, gracing Sam with a queer look. His chest tightened-- Thatcher knew. But the General merely returned his attention to his parents. "--which is why, when you insisted on being granted an audience with the Autobots, I found it necessary to have two of my men escort you to assure your safety, given the extent of the reconstruction taking place and the subsequent increase in health hazards."

Sideswiped by how thickly Thatcher was laying on the bullshit with his parents, Sam momentarily succumbed to a chortle which he quickly morphed into a believable imitation of a cough. If reconstruction posed too much of threat to any oblivious humans wandering around in the cargo bay (unlikely given that the Twins had returned to watch the exchange from between two packing crates across the room, well away from Ironhide's keen optics), his parents would have simply been refused entry. And even if they had raged, shouted, pleaded and threatened, the guards who had been standing sentry carried _guns_-- guns that looked as though they possesed ka-BOOM factors in the quadruple digits. No matter how they blustered, his parents would have been no match for guns.

But then his momentary amusement faded into bewilderment and a dark sense of foreboding-- why _had_ Thatcher found it necessary to come in person, and to bring along his G.I Joe sidekicks? Surely he didn't think that spilling the beans to his parents-- even spilling the wheelbarrow-sized load that had nothing to do with breaking his arm-- would cause them to go violent enough that they would try to attack the General? And even if he _was_ that majorly paranoid, one armed guard should have been more than enough. Now that Sam looked, really looked, he realized that not only were the jar-head goons packing sci fi worthy weapons, they were wearing sleak, amost invisble body armor beneath their black fatigues.

What was going on?

But his mother, usually endowed with all the gifts of observation God gave a block of wood, picked up on something he had not.

"Wait just a darn minute here! What do you mean, _'blast'_? Was a bomb set off or something? Shouldn't the rest of the ship be warned that we're under attack?!"

"Please calm yourself, Mrs. Witwiky. There was no bomb and we are NOT under attack."

"Yeah, come on, Mom," Sam reasoned, catching the suspicious gleam in his mother's eye that meant she was preparing to rage about more government lies and cover ups. If only she realized that the true lies were the things she took for granted (four flying out, only three flying back-- where's your return ticket, Sam?). "I mean, if we were-- which we're NOT, okay?-- why would any self-respecting bad guy set off a bomb in the cargo bay where there's no one around to get hurt? ...Well, unless the bad guy knew that there were aliens down here, but the only ones who would know_ that _are the Decepticons, and it really isn't their style to plant a bomb-- they like to get things done by hand, you know?"

"Well," she huffed, clearly befuddled by his 'this is your brain on speed' logic, though for the moment subdued, "At least no one was hurt. That's what counts."

"Yep! Absolutely. No one was hurt." Sam agreed enthusiastically, wincing as his father started examing the present Autobots with a suspicous set to his jaw. Uh-oh.

"That's all good and fine, but now we need to have a long talk with our son about how he broke his arm and where, exactly, he's been for the past _three hours_." Haggard, cross, and worried (though he tried to hide it) his father stepped forward and clamped a hand around his son's shoulder through his Super-sam cape and began to steer him toward the door. "So if you will excuse us, we'll be going now."

As silent as a leaf falling on snow, Rachet moved to intercept them. Sam started at his sudden appearance-- two azure optics locked onto his forehead as though attempting to read his mind, never shifting away to acknowledge is parents with a glance as the Autobot medic fluidly oozed up into Sam's personal space.

"One moment, if you would."

And his willowy, many-jointed fingers gingerly grasped Sam's head, entraping it in a metal cage.

In addition to his regular profession as a savior of the world, Sam moonlighted as a class A geek who frequented arcades the way an alcoholic frequented bars. Although the classic arcade-style games-- car/motorcycle/jet ski racing-- tended to be his favorites, every once in a while he would indulge himself in those games whose sole purpose was to win a prize. The mother of them all was the claw game, the staple of arcades and Walmarts everywhere from which hundreds of kids tried and failed every hour to extract a stuffed animal.

At the moment, Sam felt as though he had traded places with one of the unfortunate stuffed creatures and was suddenly in the grip of the infamous metal claw. There were a few differences, however. First a foremost, the fingers around him were not smooth chrome, but segmented metal fingers resembling spider legs. Second, his parents were not shouting encouragements, but yelling in fear and outrage.

_"What are you doing?! Get off him, you metal freak!"_

_"Let go of my son!"_

And most importantly, the metal claw which had descended and plucked him from the pile did not seem apt to let him slip through its grip. Quite the contrary-- the pin-pricks of pressure around his skull prevented him from moving his head a milimeter in any direction.

He thought he saw Thing 1 and Thing 2 start to raise their guns before Thatcher urgently hissed for them to stand down, but he couldn't be sure. No more than he could be sure he felt something tickling the skin of his scalp through those fingers, something which may have been infinitesimally small wires wiggling down through flesh and bone....

But as swiftly as the feeling came over him it ceased. The fingers released their hold, retreating away from his head as Rachet took a minute step back and briefly shuttered his optics in a gesture of confusion.

Superheroes of the ordinary world, his parents surged towards him and took up point around him, inserting themselves between their son and the alien medic (all their efforts a waste-- flesh and bone no match for alien strength, love no shield against indifferent life--).

"That's right! Keep backing up--"

"I must admit to some confusion, Sam," Rachet announced calmly, as if the two people standing guard in front of his human paient were simply part of the background. "Three times now you have uttered statements which indicate an impairment of memory function, yet I can detect no damage to brain tissue or any imbalance of those hormones involved in memory creation and retention."

Still trembling from the unexpected contact and release, Sam could only blink up at the neon Autobot stupidly, feeling slightly high. "Uh....what? What statements?"

Rachet straightened to his full height (how could something so graceful be so large?) and glanced between the three humans at his feet.

"Your declarations that no being, human or otherwise, had been injured in the destruction of the ceiling. Have you repressed the knowledge that you yourself sustained a blow sufficient to break your arm?"

Way to let the cat out of the bag, Rachet. Suddenly discovering a new target for their ire, his parents rounded on him. (Here we go. Now they're _really_ going to let it fly-- but maybe that's okay, even being yelled at means hearing their voices...)

But to Sam's utter shock, he found himself bombarded not with outrage but with gasps of sympathetic pain-- and suddenly his mother's arms came around him, crushing him to her thin body with his head buried in her bosom the way all mom-hugs world wide seemed to do. A strong, calloused hand belonging to his father found the back of his neck and squeezed (oh my son, when did you become a man?), conveying the unwavering support of a parent.

"You gotta stop this being careless thing, Sam," his father harrumphed grumpily, rubbing the pad of his thumb in soothing circles against his skin.

For a moment Sam felt as though he were riding edge of a moving sidewalk thrown abruptly into reverse-- off-kilter and struggling for balance. Why the sudden love fest when normally he'd be going deaf from all the shouting? It was only a broken arm; it wasn't as if he had almost died--

When the answer hit him, he felt thicker than a stump for missing the obvious. His parents had gone on the war path in the first place because they were _worried_ about him, as twisted at it sounded. Once more he'd been harmed without his parents having the power to stop it; once more he'd been caught up with something involving the alien visitors that could have killed him. Easily. Even if they didn't know the exact circumstances of what had occured, it didn't take a genius to do the math: Sam + Autobots + explosion violent enough to blow a smoking hole in three inch metal = flag-draped casket bearing their son.

And for the first time, smooshed against his mom, wrapping his broken arm (ow! ow! ow!) awkwardly around her back, it dawned on him that he had effectively dodged a speeding bullet. --No, scratch that. Dodged a runaway _train_ billowing flames from the engine compartment (--tortured for three weeks--) and conducted by a demon from hell (--mask became reality, Bee succumbed to the Hornet-- caring blue optics hardened to ice, ice colder than space--).

He had to swallow thickly several times before he could speak, but at last his dignity as a teenager demanded that he struggle out of the suffocating hug-- though not before tightening his own grip in return, trying to put every ounce of manly love he could into the gesture (Goodbye, mom...).

"Who said I was being careless? You need to stop jumping to random conclusions, dad. I thought you learned your lesson from the time you got us into that blood fued with the next door neighbors."

And just like that, the moment ended. His parents pulled back, returning to their previously annoyed state as though embarassed to have been caught in a family moment so sentimental that fluff practically oozed onto the floor. Well, his father at least seemed embarassed. His mother continued to look at him with red rimmed eyes, each sniff the possible prologue to another bone-crushing embrace. Sam took a deliberate step back and resettled his yellow Bumblebee blanket around his shoulders (--become someone more than human, a super hero so strong that he can't be broken by pain--), briefly wondering if the scout were lurking right outside the door.

In response to his light-hearted jab about an incident he hardly remembered, his father crossed his arms and grimaced. "That was different. I KNEW they were the ones who let their dog poop in my yard."

Sam almost laughed at the look Rachet gave his father. But the next words from the robot's vocalizer brought all pre-chuckle intentions to a screeching halt.

"While Sam's actions could hardly be termed noble, they were not, in fact, careless. Mudflap and Skids should have known that their presence, if discovered, would prompt such a reaction from Bumblebee, given his history with lurking Decepticons."

Sam could have strangled the obstuse robot. If only his hands could have fit around his neck. And if only he'd needed to breathe.

"Bumblebee," His father said flatly.

"'Stumblebee'!" His mother cried with understanding, "That red one meant Bumblebee, didn't he? The yellow robot that's been living in our garage and destroyed half our house?" Then, she gasped, "Bumblebee did that to the ceiling?....Well, I guess I'm not too surprised, considering what he did to the upstairs and our y-- _Bumblebee almost killed my baby boy_?!!"

It was Thatcher, to Sam's astonishment, who stepped forward. "Now you understand why we first inquired if you knew of Bumblebee's location, Mr. and Mrs. Witwiky," he turned his penetrating stare to Sam. "Sam, I know that your friend acted with the best intentions, I truly do--"

"No." And that was that. Whatever he wanted, no.

"Listen! I do not doubt your word or the word of Optimus Prime and the other Autobots who served as witnesses-- stop shaking your head, son, and listen to me! We only want to talk to your friend. Just talk, that's all. He will still leave the ship with you, safe and sound, in two days. I promise."

Sam only stared at him as though he'd sprouted carrots from his nose. "You're delusional if you think I believe you after-- if you think I believe you." He glanced back to his parents, but fortunately they didn't seem to pick up on his slip. "Two things, okay? First, I haven't seen Bumblebee and I don't know where he is--" (Don't swallow, don't blink-- Bee, run!) "--And second, I'm going to be there when you talk to him. And I really don't give a damn if you say no, because I'm going to do it anyway." The implication hit home, judging by the General's slight wince. As a ward of the Autobots, Thatcher had no true authority over him and he knew it. The older man _did_ hold the trump card of being able to bash his parents over the head with the truth at a moment's notice, but he was at least intelligent enough to realize that he himself would suffer enough damage in the backlash to counteract any leverage over Sam.

Rather than argue with (and thereby lose caste to) a teenager, Thatcher turned regally to Ironhide. "My friend, would you happen to know of Bumblebee's whereabouts?"

Much to everyone's shock and Sam's silent feeling of triumph, Ironhide gave the equilvalent of a disbelieving snort and rebuffed, "Even if I did, Bumblebee is more a friend of mine than you could ever be. I believe you humans have a phrase for it-- 'Sempre Fi'."

Remembering the term from an old WWII movie, Sam whispered the translation in floored awe, "'Always faithful,'" And just to prove his latent ability to ignore the seriousness of a situation, he added helpfully, "You've mixed up your slogans, Ironhide. Sempre Fi is used by the Marines."

"Which, as I understand it, is a subdivision of the United States Navy. It's use on board this vessel in entirely appropriate," Rachet lifted a finger in a manner reminiscent of a grade school teacher lecturing the class as he spoke, but lowered it again as he turned to Thatcher (And hissed something that sounded distinctly like 'You Idiot' to Ironhide, but once again Sam was convinced he was probably imagining things). "Unfortunately for you, General, Ironhide speaks the truth. Bumblebee has the ability, as a scout, to shield the radiation signature of his own spark from even my powerful scanners. We do not know where he is."

Thatcher frowned. "Can you raise him on your internal radio, or otherwise get into contact with him?"

"That will not be necessary, General Thatcher," Bumblebee called softly, emerging from behind a stack of tarp-draped containers, "I'm here."

_Bee_.

Sam twisted the fingers of his good hand into the folds of his yellow blanket, childishly wishing he could give the yellow Autobot a hug. Holding tight to the gift from his guardian would have to suffice-- especially when his father pushed him behind his broad shouldered back, planting himself between the two.

"Ah, good! Thank you for coming, Bumblebee. Now that you are here, there are several things we need to discuss--"

"Starting with what the hell you thought you were doing shooting off that gun of yours around my son." His father interjected forcefully.

Sam knew, _knew_, that he couldn't be the only one to see the yellow scout flinch as though struck. But if any other the other Autobots or humans caught the motion, they didn't react to it. Had he really taken to watching his guardian so closely that he picked up movement not even Rachet noticed?

At first irritated by the interruption, Thatcher settled into a patient tolerance, once more clasping his hands behind his back as he did whenever involved with something very serious. Sam wondered idly if he did so to prevent anyone from seeing his hands twist and bead with nervous sweat. Apparently, his father's question had been something along the lines of what the General himself wanted to know.

Bumblebee paused before answering, looking from Rachet to Ironhide for support and seemingly finding none. At last he lowered himself into a sinuous crouch, backing away from the assembled group until a stark shadow obscured half his form, transforming the parts left in darkness into vague blobs of golden luminescence. It took Sam a minute to realize that the posture was submissive-- and he refused to think of what it meant that his alien friend had been adopting that same stance with greater frequency around him, as though expecting attack (or unconsciously barring himself from....something. Not attacking-- never was there the intent to hurt. Something else, something he was terrified he might do if his control slipped for even a moment around his human charge....).

"It was not my intention to shoot with Sam in the room, or to shoot at all," he began to explain in the same quiet voice, though his tone was unhesitant, filled with a stony determination (so much like Optimus) that bordered on grim. "As I understand it, Mudflap and Skids contacted Sam and presuaded him to join them on an adventure of sorts. They lead him to a mantinence hallway from which they were able to access the air duct which runs-- ran-- through the ceiling above the cargo bay. Just there." he pointed to the gaping wound of twisted metal from which Sam had fallen.

"So you started getting all trigger happy and decided to play target practice, nearly hitting my Sammy in the process." His mother quipped.

If it were possible, Bumblebee sank even farther into himself, backing completely into the day-time shadows (a faint golden glow, a flickering candle flame guttering in the dark).

"No." A pause, several alien clicks and whirrs, fingers brushing the floor (claws that longed gouge furrows into the sheet metal in agony). "I was not engaged in target practice; I did not simply 'get all trigger happy' and aim at the wrong place-- I came after Sam with the intent to kill him."

For an instant the world ceased to spin on its axis.

Then his mother stumbled back a step in shock, all the blood fleeing her face and leaving it a pasty white (So innocent, so naive-- you never expected the truth, did you?). His father, swiftly recovering from the stiffness of shock, flushed a deep purple, the color of directionless fury.

Thatcher frowned, seeming stymied rather than disturbed or even frightened.

"That's not the whole story, according to Optimus Prime. Is it, Bumblebee?"

And finally, something inside his father snapped. He twisted briefly to spear Thatcher with one meaty finger. "I don't give a shit what some robot says! You stay out of this, you pompous son of a bitch!"

He shook off his wife as, wide eyed, she tried to grasp his arm. "Get off, Judy! I have a hunk of scrap to melt!" His rage focused itself on Bumblebee, who shrunk away from the human only a sixteenth of his mass the way he never shrank from Megatron (--human hands hurting him, human hands holding him down--). "And you--"

A fist colliding with his shoulder in an indignant punch halted him in his tracks. "Don't you tell ME to get off, Ron! And don't you _dare_ try to do something stupid like attack it-- I don't want to have to drag your remains home in an _envelope_!"

"I'll do whatever the hell I want--"

"No!" Sam pushed his father back away from Bumblebee (my friend, my guardian, my--), wincing as he used his broken arm without thinking. His father stumbled, taken off guard, and for a moment Sam froze in bewilderment-- he didn't think his push had carried so much force (--'_Stay away from him!', 'Look! He's not fighting back!'_--). Without concious thought, without even truly realizing what he was doing or why he was doing it, he stepped right up into his father's face, pushing him again with both hands. "Stay away from him!" He said, though is voice came out a scream, "You stay away from him! I won't let you hurt him! I'll fight you! I'll fight you! _I won't let you hurt him!_"

For a moment his father simply stared at him open-mouthed. "Sam! You heard it right from the horse's mouth-- _That monster tried to kill you!_"

"You don't know ANYTHING!" he cried, pushing his father again, "You weren't THERE! He thought I was a Decepticon! He thought I was a spy! He was doing his job trying to protect me from them!"

Suddenly furious in return, though still bearing an expression of helpless fear and desperation, his father pushed back and grabbed him by his shoulders.

"Son, you're _obsessed! _It's a robot! Who knows what's going on in its head?! What happens the next time he mistakes you for a Decepticon?!" He started shaking Sam by the shoulders, hard, causing his teeth to rattle in his skull and his arm to flare in agony. He gave a short little cry, but his father didn't appear to notice. "_What happens when the next shot doesn't miss?!"_

Proving that his reputation as a scout was well deserved, Bumblebee crossed the room to them in a movement so swift, so utterly alien in its absolute lack of noise, that he seemed to simply appear behind them. Deft fingers pulled one of his father's arms up and away from Sam's shoulder, immediately releaving the bone crushing pressure of his vice-like grip. Holding him by the arm, Bee plucked him from the floor, transferring him laterally through the air as easily as moving a cup from one table to another. And with characteristic care, Bee set his father back on his feet fifteen feet away from Sam. Safe. Rumpled, too stunned to be frightened, but unharmed.

But as soon as the yellow Autobot had darted towards them, the two armed and armored guards dropped back into combat stances, clicked off the safeties on their weapons, and framed Bumblebee's head in their cross hairs.

Sam had nearly forgotten the almost tracelike state he had entered when threatening Galloway at breakfast. But at the sight of the two black muzzels leveled at Bumblebee, the roaring white static descended once more, blocking out everything else in the world except the threat to his friend, and with a strangled battle cry-- regardless of the screeches of outrage from the other Autobots (including the Twins, who abandoned their hiding place), regardless of Thatcher shouting at the guards to stand down, regardless of the fact that he was probably making the stupidest mistake of his short life-- Sam lunged for the nearest guard.

The barrel of the gun swung to face him at his approach, but the soldier wielding it was too surprised to pull the trigger in time. Sam's arms came up (his broken bones no longer hurt-- he felt nothing, saw nothing, save for the gun), hands curling around the wide muzzel of the weapon, and thrust it up and away from its intended target, pointing the cross hairs at a point above all their heads.

But though the guard was only a fraction of a second too late to put a slug through Sam's heart, he still squeezed the trigger in reflex-- the gun roared beside his ear, impossibly loud, and one of the packing crates exploded into a hail storm of flying wood splinters as long as Sam was tall. Though still trapped in the pounding white rage, every fiber of his being roaring out a chant to obliterate anything that tried to hurt his friend (--saved me, captured because he saved me--- maimed and leg-less, still he fought back, fought back to protect him-- a desparate cry for help, and the yellow angel was there, breaking the chain-wielder's neck, ripping the spine from the feral monster--), enough of his human mind remained active to realize that any slug that had enough power to do that to the metal and wood box as big as a couch was not meant to stop humans. He had been wrong from the start; the guards weren't stationed at the door to halt intruders, weren't accompanying Thatcher on his quest to find Bee in order to protect his parents from construction debris or even to act as make-shift body guards-- they were packing heat powerful enough to hurt a transformer not to protect the Autobots from the humans, but to blow the Autobots to pieces if they put one toe out of line. They thought Bumblebee had gone rogue, and they came bringing the necessary fire power to destroy him.

The guard struggled with him for the gun, and Sam struggled back. The Super-sam cape fell from his shoulders (how infantile to play at make believe-- all the fuzzy warmth in the world couldn't stop a bullet, couldn't do a damn thing to protect his friends--). Fueled by a passion beyond words, beyond even anger or fear or anything that he could describe as other than the overwhelming need to _protect_ the precious spark of goodness in his life, he was somehow able to hold his own. Exhausted, bruised, sporting a broken arm-- five inches shorter, fifty pounds lighter, lacking a soldier's muscle-- he nonetheless forced the gun away from his parents, away from Bee, feet scrabbling for purchase against the floor, plaster straining enough to crack.

"Stand down! That's an order, soldier! STAND DOWN!"

But the guard couldn't let go because Sam wouldn't let go, and Sam wouldn't let go because if he let go of this he let go of everything-- failed to protect everything that meant something to him. He had already failed Bumblebee once; he would go to Hell and back before it happened again.

_"ENOUGH!"_

Out of nowhere, the searing beam of a lazer only the width of a pencil slipped with robotic aim between their hands and blasted the gun from both their grips. It skittered across the floor, coming to rest almost twenty feet away. A gaping hole through its center steamed, bubbled and oozed.

Dimly recognizing the voice that had shaken the very walls with its sheer power and authority, Sam looked to his side and up, way up, at a very pissed Optimus Prime. The tiny arm-mounted blaster that had fired the shot folded in on itself and clicked back into place in his arm. A moment later, the disconcerting view into Optimus' inner workings visible through the gap disappeared as a plate of red-and-blue flame armor slithered back into its place, covering the transformed weapon.

Everyone started shouting all at once-- his parents at him, Bumblebee, the guard, and Thatcher; Thatcher at his parents, Bee, and the guard; Rachet and Ironhide at each other, the twins, Optimus, and Thatcher. Optimus simply stared down at him.

"Are you alright?" He asked softly, still angry but obviously not at _him_.

Sam couldn't nod. He couldn't shake his head. He couldn't whip out a snappy, 'Do you have a gun for every occasion?'. The white fog was fading, dissipating as though it had never existed, and without its artificial strength Sam felt like three-week-old left-over casserole. His head pounded. His arm blazed with pain. In summary, he felt so terrible that for once he almost came out and said 'no.'

But then Bee was there, drawing him gently away. Sam went willingly, for once content to be guided. A little distance away from the epicenter of the argument-flinging fire fight, Bee crouched down and led Sam to sit before him, angling his metallic body to shield the human with his limbs.

"Sam," his guardian angel murmured. Sam almost expected him to launch into a carefully delivered yet nonetheless stern lecture, but Bumblebee simply settled himself behind him without a word. Caught up watching Optimus sadly turn from them and move to join the fray, Sam almost didn't hear the sharp-- and swiftly muffled-- crack from behind him. He was so dazed, in fact, that his instincts forgot to instuct him to cringe as a giant finger touched the base of his skull, brushing his hair out of the way. The contact tingled against his skin, strangely warming. Ever so slowly, the finger moved down his back, tracing the curve of his spine, spreading a curious lightness in its wake. Muscles clenched tighter than stone quivered and relaxed. He slumped even farther forward, studying his hands as they sat limply in his lap.

The finger returned to the base of his spine, stroking down once more, but this time it was joined by other fingers-- the metal digits ran gently over his ribs, smoothed across his shoulders. And with each touch, a little of the pain lessened. Again and again the fingers ran over his spine, his back, the up and down motion falling into a steady pattern. After stroking him like a cat for what seemed an eternity, the fingers returned to his neck and rubbed there gently, feathering along the column of his throat, working deep into the muscles of his shoulders. It was the best neck massage he'd ever had, hands down. Better even than the ones Mikaela gave. By the time Bee had begun to use his thumb to work a circle into the muscle below his shoulder blade, Sam was limper than a wet dishrag, leaning back into the pressure, utterly unable to support himself. The pain in his arm had receded to a periphery annoyance like a post-it note stuck to the refridgerator.

The soothing/stroking/massaging/petting must have gone on for quite a while, because when at last Rachert turned away from the melee, the screams of outrage had calmed to mere shouts. His brilliant gaze searched out Sam. When he spotted the human with Bee, his optics honed in on the hand touching his back. Something he saw upset him to no end. He stalked in their direction, drawing the attention of his parents, and whispered to Bee with a kind of furious indulgence, "You idiot."

Sam made a weak noise of protest as Rachet scooped him out of Bumblebee's hands, but the medic paid him no mind.

Suddenly reminded of why they were all fighting, his parents rushed toward him, crying, "Sam! Oh, sweet cakes! Are you alright?" "Sam! Did he shoot you? Are you bleeding?"

Rachet ignored them all. He set the staggering human in his grasp back on his feet, transformed two fingers of one hand into a very sharp, clear needle which instantly filled with an amber fluid, and injected the needle into the side of Sam's neck.

"Ouch!" he cried, instantly revived from his Bumblebee-induced stupor. He clapped a hand to the throbbing point of impact, encountering a single drop of moisture on the skin-- when he examined his fingers, he found them smeared with red. With a kind of slow, creeping horror, he realized he could _feel _whatever it was flowing through his veins-- a strange, though not unpleasant, coolness spread in its wake.

"What was that?!" his mother shrieked as this father paled with horror, "What kind of motor oil did you pump into my son?!"

Rachet graced them with a decidely snide look. "Unless you are in danger of poisoning yourself and everyone you encounter, you should realize that 'motor oil' is extremely toxic to the human body."

Starting to feel woozy, Sam stumbled, lifting a hand to his temple and shaking his head. Rachet's hand came from behind him and nudged into the backs of his knees-- the slight pressure was all that was needed to crumple his legs beneath him, causing him to collapse back into Rachet's palm. He tried to breathe evenly, fighting the wooziness, wondering if he could make it to the infirmary before he died of poisoning.

Yet to his mingled relief and fear, Rachet continued; "To answer your implied question, I administered a pain reliever combined with a mild sedative. --Your vigorous shaking almost knocked the fractured bones out of alignment, Mr. Witwicky," he elaborted, a distinctly dangerous edge to his tone, "As did Sam's struggle to divert the soldier's weapon from its target. And if you did not know, the sensation of the two broken edges of a fractured bone rubbing against one another is exceedingly painful."

He thought that both his parents looked even paler and sicker, if that were possible, but he couldn't quite tell-- everything shimmered with haloed light, as if he were viewing the world through frosted glass. The sedative thing did take away the pain, but it didn't cause him to feel so elementally _good_ as Bumblebee's ministrations had-- he only felt somewhat sleepy.

"We're his parents!" His father finally burst out, after passing a shaking hand over his eyes, "You can't just do things like give our kid sedatives without asking us first!"

"There are two flaws with your reasoning," Rachet pointed out, lifting the weak human into his clinical embrace despite his feeble protests. Sam's arms were just to heavy to move as quickly or as forcefully as he wanted them too. "One, Sam is 18 solar cycles of age and therefore, by your reasoning, an adult and free to make decisions with or without your approval."

"But you didn't ask him! He has rights--- he could slap a lawsuit on your ass!"

"And two," the medic cut across his mother (...no...don't), "Sam is now technically our ward and under our care-- and as the Chief Medical Science Officer for all Autobots that makes Sam _my_ patient. I am at liberty to treat my patients however I see fit."

"Your....ward?" (Stop....please....)

"Yes. As of approximately two hours, twenty five minute, thirty seven seconds ago, Sam is officially under our jurisdiction."

"But he's an American citizen! You can't just....do that!"

"Go look up the word jurisdiction, cross referenced with country nationality. Sam is no longer a citizen of the United States of America."

(....shit.....)

Sam's eyes had fallen closed-- he pried them back open, blearily searching out the vaguely human-shaped blobs of his parents turning on Thatcher. There was another blob beside Thatcher, one that must have come in while they'd all been fighting. It took a few slow blinks to clear his vision enough to see the blob's face, but when he did the shock of it lifted his head above the warm waves of chemcially-induced slumber. The first thing he noticed upon surfacing was that he'd somehow become wrapped in his yellow blanket. When had that happened?

Though on some level he'd expected it, he was still shocked when he languidly rolled his head to the side and looked down at the humans below to see Galloway standing beside General Thatcher.

His father, rapidly approaching the pair, ignored the politician in favor of sticking his finger into Thatcher's chest. Sam supposed that made sense. Galloway-- minus his suit coat, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his hair sticking out at strange angles-- cut a much less dramatic and authoritative figure than the immaculate General.

"And just who the hell approved this?! Who said that taking my son away and giving him to a bunch of aliens would be okay?!"

"Sir," Thatcher began patiently, "I am sorry for your loss, but in the interests of national security and your son's security this change was necessary. If need be, compensation can be provided--"

But his father didn't give Thatcher the chance to finish his sentence. He reared back and swung his fist with all his might into the General's jaw.

"I'M NOT GOING TO SELL MY SON!!"

Other frantic motions took place after that, but the pull of Rachet's sedative became too strong to fight. Just before the warm darkness overcame him, he could could have sworn he saw Galloway pull out his cell phone, dial in a number, and hand it to his father, saying; "Mr. Witwicky? The President of the United States."

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A green glow in the darkness, the size of a stick of gum.

Blink.

The glow sharpened into green scribbles which fizzed like sparklers.

...What?

Breathe in slowly through the nose. Blink.

Green scribbles became numbers. 3, 5, and 4. He couldn't make heads or tails of them. Were they important?

Blink.

The dark lightened into something not-so-dark, something with familiar shapes and scents.

....Was that a steering wheel?

Blink.

Reclining in a leather seat, head nodding at the dash board. Green numbers from the digital clock glowed back at him: 3:55.

--And with a jolt, the meaning behind the three nonsensical shapes came flooding back into his mind, informing him cheerfully that the indicated time was most likely on the 'am' scale rather than the 'pm' scale. 3:55am; the middle of the night.

Sam came surging back to full awareness in Bumblebee's driver seat, lunging forward into an upright position. Not a smart choice, in retrospect. Pain sparked in his chest, in his arm (ow, ow, ow!), in his head, reminding him that abrupt motion probably was _not_ an advisable course when his body resembled one giant bruise.

"Ow," he announced definitively to the air, a blanket statement to cover all the various hurts marshalling against him.

His yellow super-sam cape must have lain draped across him as he slept; it slid from his chest and pooled in his lap when he jerked upright. Deciding that he'd much rather be warm and horizontal again, Sam slumped back into the seat (which graciously moved forward to meet him half way and slowly lowered him back down), and tugged the blanket up over his stomach.

Eye sliding closed, he licked his chapped lips and called, "Bee?" Or at least, he tried to call. His sleep-numb throat mangled the attempt, warping the single syllable into a murmured sigh of formless air.

But somehow, the Autobot still heard him. It must have been another of his super powers in addition to general awesomeness-- the ability to decipher Sam-speak into something approaching actual words. Either that, or he took the chance that his human passenger was merely calling his name and not telling him to shove his own cannon up his tail pipe.

_"'I'll. be. there. for yoooou!'....'That's my name, don't wear it out!"_

Sam groaned.

"Please, anything but cheesy 90's sitcoms, Bee." At least he could understand himself that time. He peeled back his eye lids, trying to glance through the windows to see who, if anyone, might have been silently giggling at him as he slept. But the sun-filtering tint to the windows had darkened to black, rendering them completely opaque. No one could seee in....and he couldn't see out.

"Are my parents still out there, waiting to rip me to shreds?" But as soon as the words left his mouth, he realized how nonsensical such an assumption was. It had been almost seven hours since his parents had learned his terrible secret; any sane individual would have long since gone to bed, especially if the subject of their dismay were asleep and therefore unavailable for brow-beating.

"No, Sam," Bumblebee informed him, thankfully not commenting on his post-drugging lack of coherency. "All the other humans left some hours ago. They thought it would be best to simply let you sleep rather than attempt to move you."

Had his parents really thought that, or had Rachet run circles around them with condescending logic until they submitted just to shut him up?

"Well, that's good--" He let loose a jaw-cracking yawn, ruffling a hand through his hair and sighing deeply. "--I won't have to deal with a small-scale Second Coming for at least three hours, then. Fire and brimstone really cramp my style, you know?"

"Fire, brimstone, AND flying monkeys." Bee pointed out. Sam laughed as the Autobot twiddled his steering wheel playfully.

"That too." Then, giggles fading, he slowly curled up into a relatively upright position once more, reaching for the door handle. "Well, goodnight, then. I guess I better go back to my own bed."

The handle reacted easily enough to his tough, but the door itself seemed reluctant to swing open.

"You could sleep here, if you wish," the scout offered hesitantly.

"Bee...look, I appreciate it, I really do," he soothed his friend, hesitating for only a moment before reaching out and petting the dash (--not true friendship, only convenience--), "But it's been a really wierd day, and I want to have the little slice of normalcy of getting to sleep in a real bed. Not that you aren't comfy, because you are--" he flushed deeply as he realized how his comment could be taken, and abruptly cut himself off, "--well, nevermind. Look, I think we both need some space right now. It can't be much fun for you to have to babysit a human all the time (--don't swallow, don't look hurt if he agrees--), so it would be better if I just-- wait. That slimeball said something to you, didn't he?" The last wisps of sleep vanished, replaced by a simmering of cool anger in the pit of his stomach. "Thatcher did that 'talk' thing he was raving about, and either he or Galloway told you something nasty..." He longed for Bee to deny it, but the continued silence only fueled his dread. "Or my dad. --Oh god, they talked to you about me, didn't you? They said that I'd be scared, that I'd stay away from you."

He latched onto the doorframe, using it as a hand hold to manoeuver his protesting body from Bee's deep seats, pulling his yellow blanket out with him. "Well, no matter what, that's not going to happen. So don't you _dare_ believe them--"

"The subject of our relationship did come up, yes," Bee suddenly cut him off, "But they didn't say what you seem to think. And asking you to stay has nothing to do with being afraid of _Thatcher_."

"What, then?" Sam turned to speak to the darkened interior, arm braced on Bumblebee's roof. God, he was tired.

But the yellow scout seemed nervous, and almost embarassed. He went through several false starts before replying, "Rachet." As if that explained everything.

Sam only blinked, uncomprehending. "...Rachet." He repeated.

Even in silence and perfect stillness, Bumblebee gave off an impression of nervous fidgeting. "Rachet wants to see me. If you hadn't noticed, he isn't the most pleasant of us to be around--"

"Nevertheless," The neon medic interjected from above Sam's head, nearly causing him to jump out of his skin, "For the sake of your own welfare I should think that you would cease your attempts at stalling and, as the humans say, 'get it over with'."

Without a word Bumblebee shut his door and began to transform; Sam staggered away to give him room, and was met with the steading presence of a large, spidery hand behind his back. When the last of the yellow scout's parts clicked into place, Sam met his blue optics in confusion and slight fear.

"You're hurt?"

But it was Rachet who answered, "Not precisely. He is, however, in trouble." And he carelessly stepped over top of the small human and approached the yellow scout, hissing to himself (and Bumblebee) angrily.

Sam looked at Bee with growing horror. "Is it about me? About how you...does it have to do with me?" he warbled, voice humiliatingly small.

"In a way," Bee avoided, turning to follow Rachet deeper into the cargo bay. "Go get some rest, Sam. I will see you tomorrow."

"Yeah, you better!" He yelled after the pair (--not worthy, doesn't need me, my- my--), "Or I'll come hunt you down! I could do it, too-- you're _yellow!_"

The scout turned his head and made a show of rolling his optics at the human, then waved a humoring hand in a sort of 'get lost, dork' motion. It saddened him to know Bee probably felt none of the light-hearted emotion he displayed for Sam's benefit.

But just before he turned to leave, Sam caught a glimpse of something odd. The moment came and went so suddenly he could never really be sure of what he'd seen, but for an instant it looked as though one of Bee's fingers were bent at an angle that, on a human, would have ripped it from the socket. If he didn't know better, he would have sworn the metal digit were broken.

But then Bee turned away, and the view of his hand vanished behind his bulk. Vanished as though it had never existed.

And soon, even the memory of the disquieting sight slipped from Sam's mind like water through a sieve.

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He'd meant to head straight to bed. He even started out going in the correct direction to do just that. But several turns later he found himself passing by his own door without easing it open and continuing down the hall to Mikaela's room.

Despite her intimidating Amazonian impression over the phone, she had not shown up in the cargo bay-- sheathed in tight jeans and heart-puncturing heels-- to throw herself into the middle of the confrontation, either to lend her considerable support or to knock him down a few pegs. Which was new. Mikaela could do a lot of things, but working the passive-agressive angle was not one of them; she preferred to get everything out in the open, pick up a proverbial elephant rifle, and shoot the problem in the head. So the fact that she had taken a rain check on a particularly juicy mud-flinging/Sam-tormenting session set off a little blinking red light in his head. Something was up.

But regardless of his unusual nocturnal alertness, it _was_ the middle of the night (well, early morning, but the concept still applied); every other overhead light had been extinguished in those hallways which boasted of private sleeping quarters. No light shone through the tiny crack beneath his girlfriend's door.

And yet he could not convince himself to turn around and head back to his own room. The way the television psychics could predict their viewers picking up the phone to order their products (only more clearly), he saw himself walking back to his closet-sized quarters, changing his clothes, shutting off the light and crawling into bed...and lying there two, three, four hours later, still staring blankly at the ceiling, at times breaking out in a cold sweat, at times sobbing quietly where no one could hear him. When Bee had asked him to stay the night (giggle...stupid innuendo), he had been sorely tempted to give in and let the gentle alien soothe away the crushing fear with his solid presence. As childish as it sounded inside his head, he couldn't bear the thought of being alone with his thoughts. They had developed multiple personality disorders and started carrying around bloody axes.

But neither could he bring himself to be enough of a jerk to wake Mikaela up because of _his_ problems. Caught between the gentlemanly Super-sam and the merely human Sam, he settled for bracing his hands on the door frame and resting his forehead against the slick surface of the door, trying to project his thoughts into the room beyond. Did she sleep on her stomach? Curled up in a ball? Naked? (take a deep breath, bash the libido over the head). Did her lashes flutter like dark-winged butterflies against her tanned skin? Did she snore? Did she mumble his name?

Hoping that she would miraculously hear him calling, he whispered, "Mikaela?" His voice barely tickled his own ears, fainter than a little kid's reluctant to disturb his parents after a nightmare. "Mikaela?"

He knew-- _knew_-- that she must have been an angel in disguise. And the sleepy voice that wafted out into the hallway in response to his plea proved it.

"....Sam?....Stop loitering in the hallway...."

Needing no other invitation, he slowly pushed open the door, ducking his head around the lip into the darkened expanse beyond. His eyes had not entirely adjusted to the gloom, but he caught sight of rustling movement on the bed.

"Can I....Can I turn on the light?" He whispered.

"Mm-hmm." An affirmative grunt.

His hand fumbled out along the wall for a light switch, found it, and winced sympathetically as harsh flourescent light bathed the room.

"Sorry, that's bright," He glanced around, spying a desk lamp. "Here."

He sprinted across the room, stumbling in his haste to make as little noise as possible, and switch on the goose-necked lamp. It soft orange glow relieved him-- some of the newer models glowed brighter than the sun-- and he swiftly moved to turn off the overhead lights. Near dark descended once more, but this time the little lamp, shining out like a cheap knock-off of a romatic fire crackling in a brick hearth, shed enough light to make everything in the room visible, albiet robed in shadows.

He turned to face Mikaela, finding her sitting up in bed. Despite his fevered imaginings of finding her dressed in a lacey night gown, she wore a set of men's pj's three sizes to big, leaving the top two buttons undone. Very sexy, in a demure girl-next-door sort of way. Hair mussed, face pale from sleep, she appeared in that moment to be the most beautiful thing in the world. Sure, he told her sappy things like that all the time, and he meant them (mostly). But now, the sight of her caused his mouth to dry, his heart to race, popping all the thoughts in his mind like ephemeral bubbles. She wasn't just hot, or sexy, or gorgeous, or all the many other things men called out at her as she passed. Not that she wasn't those too, but some indefinable quality-- like a ray of light breaking softly through a canopy of trees, like the sound of the ocean at night, like the laughter of little kids at the playground, like all the things that held him momentarily spellbound (though he would never admit to it, for fearing of looking like a pussy)-- lifted her above ordinary attractiveness. She didn't merely appear beautiful, she _was _beautiful.

Because after fighting with him at the battle at Mission city, after putting up with his randomness for months as they dated, after following him to egypt under the threat of imminent death, she surprised him once again. He would have understood, even expected it, if she had screeched at him to get out for interrupting her rest as he had interrupted her life. But she didn't. She didn't yell. She didn't throw things at his head. She didn't even scowl in a way that clearly conveyed 'it's 4am, what the hell do you want?'.

Instead, she did something so simple, yet so profoundly beautiful that it humbled him the way only Bee's loyalty had.

She smiled.

"It's late, I know," he stuttered awkwardly (--only one more day, then she's gone--), "Like, unforgivably late-- a-and I'd totally understand if you decide to just kick me out for waking you up, cause I probably would have done the same if someone came and woke me up-- well, maybe not to you, you can come wake me up any time of the night you want." He mentally kicked himself into shutting up before he said something irrevocably stupid.

"What are you doing here, Sam?" she yawned, swinging her feet out from under the covers and pushing her hair back with both hands.

"Me? Here? As in, inside your room at 4am? Um..." (What was that reason, again?) "...Oh! I came to see if you were okay, you know? I mean, not that you shouldn't be, but you sounded ready to open up a can of wup-ass in your messages and I'd thought you'd want to be present for the train-wreck conversation....but you weren't there."

Scooting over on the bed, Mikaela patted the space next to her. "I did want to go with you, at first."

He sat in the proferred space, smiling ruefully, and dropped the yellow blanket on the end of the bed. "...And then you got mad at me for not answering your calls."

"I _was_ mad. But that's not why I didn't come with you, Sam." She leaned against him, tucking her head under his chin. "I realized that you should probably have a chance to talk to your parents on your own without your over-protective girlfriend breathing down your neck."

The words 'over-protective' and 'girlfriend' used in conjunction like that made his heart thud a little more quickly in his chest.

"I could have used a crazy-ass girlfriend breathing down my neck." (Stupid stupid STUPID!)

But Mikaela only snorted with laughter. "You're a big boy. You can handle your own parents without me."

Just talking to her, hearing her voice, lifted a boulder from his chest. Even in the dimly lit room, the world seemed brighter when she leaned on him wearing XXL men's pj's.

"You have waaay too much confidence in me. It's really sexy."

Then, feeling unexpectedly playful, he swept her hair aside and brushed his lips against the ticklish part of her neck. She squirmed, holding in a squeal, and hit him lightly in the chest. He shifted to the left to ward off further attack, and sat on a small, hard, cylindrical something that was distinctly un-sheet-like. Rooting around beneath the covers, he fished it out and held it up for inspection. His mystification only increased. It was a marker. A black Sharpie, to be more exact.

Mikaela snatched it out of his hand.

"You weren't supposed to see that yet." And unexpectedly, she blushed.

Bitch-slapping, alien-butt-kicking Mikaela never blushed, not even the time he had accidentally walked in on her naked. Even then, she had only shouted until his ears were ringing and slammed the door in his face. But never blushed. He didn't know that she _could_.

His devious grin stretched for ear to ear, and he wrestled the Sharpie away from her, holding it out of reach. "Now why would little miss 'Kaela be sleeping with a Sharpie?"

Face stained cherry red to the tips of her ears, she struggled against him for a minute in the dark, then sat back in a huff, crossing her arms. The sleeves of her shirt covered all but her finger tips. The sight was so cute that for a moment he wanted to drop the marker and jump her with the most toe-curlingly awesome bout of snuggling of her life. But he restrained himself (--behold Super-Sam's amazing powers of self control!--), only tapping the incriminating evidence thoughtfully against his palm.

"You _could _be making a sign, but I don't see any poster board, so that's out. Or you could be planning on sneaking into the cargo bay while Optimus is sleeping and drawing all over his face, but I guess the fact that he normally looks like a truck would throw a monkey wrench in that plan--"

"I wanted to sign your cast." She blurted, cutting off his wild musings. His grin of amusement softened into a loving smile.

"That works too," he held out the Sharpie, wiggling it a little when she refused to uncross her arms, "You could always do it now, if you want." But then, something occured to him. "Wait; how did this end up in your bed."

Finally she ended her sulk and offered him a smile of her own. "You have a real problem, Sam-- you always assume that the people around you can't love you as much as you love them." She snatched the Sharpie out of his suddenly lax fist, gripping it triumphantly. "I fell asleep waiting for you to come back."

As stupid as it was, the sentiment rendered him breathless. "You...waited up for me? You held that thing, waiting for me to come back so you could sign my cast, until you fell asleep?"

She pulled the cap off with a tiny pop, quipping, "Don't you dare get all mushy on me, Sam. --Now close your eyes. I've been wanting to do this for hours."

Confused, he pulled his casted arm back from the approaching black tip.

"Close my eyes?" he repeated, incredulous, "Why? I've always wanted to have someone sign my cast!"

"Well, _I_ want what I write to be a surprise," she answered coyly, leaning forward to kiss the bridge of his nose. His eyes closed in reflex. "Now close your eyes-- there's a good boy. This will only take a minute."

He couldn't obviously feel her fingers through the plaster, but he felt his arm being raised and heard the dry squeak of the marker moving across the uneven surface. Just a peek. It wouldn't hurt anything--

"Keep your eyes closed, you cheater." (Damn. She had to have mind-reading powers).

The Sharpie continued to squeak of a long time. Far longer than he'd expected.

"Are you writing a monologue or something?" he whispered conspiratorially, "Cause you'd have to grow a mustache to twirl and practice your evil laugh to go along with it."

She shushed him, smothering laughter. Mission accomplished. Girls always went for the guys that could make them laugh.

"There, all done!" He moved to open his eyes, and she pressed her hand over them. "No! Don't look yet. Keep them closed for a minute."

The bed dipped, and with a rustling of starched fabric he felt her rise from the bed and move across the room.

"One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand--"

"You're really annoying, Sam. You know that?"

"Four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand--"

And the desk lamp switched off, plunging the room into darkness. Regardless of his girl friend's instructions, his eyes snapped open, searching the darkened room. He saw Mikaela's silhouette moving back across the room, and a moment later her warm body rejoined him on the bed. He scowled at her, twisting his cast this way and that in the dark. He couldn't see anything.

"Hey!" he whined, "That's not fair!"

"I want it to be a surprise. You'll just have to wait until to tomorrow to look at it."

"Oooor I could go out in the hall and look at it there--"

A hand found the back of his head and pulled him down into a kiss, cutting off the rest of his sentence. After too short a time, Mikaela pulled back, releasing all of him but one hand.

"No," She told him firmly, "Signing your cast isn't the only thing I've been waiting hours for. Tell me what happened."

Cautiously optimistic that her memory would prove flawed (though his luck never ran that way), he asked slowly, "You mean with my parents, right?"

"Right." (breathe out slowly in relief, there is a God after all--). "AND what you talked about with Optimus."

"Optimus?" He squeaked, "What's there to tell?"

She sighed in exasperation. "I don't know. That's why I asked. You've been acting strangely ever since you two split up. First you wouldn't answer your phone--"

"Hey! That was Bee's fault! Blame him, not me. Innocent victim, here."

"--then you stood out in the hallway for forever without even knocking, and _now_ you're acting all strange. Like your dog just died, or something." (--or like my heart just died, plucked straight from my chest--).

Sam knew he could have lied. One of the few talents he possesed was the ability to talk his way into, or out of, almost anything. But judging by how his infrequent attempts to smooth-talk Mikaela into sleeping with him had been going, his girlfriend had at least partial immunity. (stuck permanently at second base-- every teenaged boy's nightmare. But that was okay, because kissing Mikaela was comparable to wild monkey sex with anyone else....or so he assumed). There was also the uber slimey, dirty feeling that came from lying to someone who only had his best interests at heart. He could lie his ass off to Megatron without losing a wink of sleep, but lying to Mikaela was something else entirely.

And he also knew, no matter how he screamed internally in denial-- digging his fingernails into the fabric of his old life and refusing to let go-- that the truth would come out anyway in a little over a day when he didn't get on that plane with them back to America. Better to break it to her now, while she could break up with him in relative privacy, than two days from now and have everyone see the unbridgable rift form between them. The rift part may have been inevitable (--never go home, never see her again--), but at the very least he didn't want everyone and their uncle looking at him in pity for the rest of his quickly shortening life at NEST.

There was also the matter of the slim, warm hand holding his. It squeezed gently in encouragement, in support, hardening his determination.

And with an internal sob of despair, he told her everything. She listened in silence as he poured everything out into the air between them, vomiting an endless stream of words (of pain) into her lap. Strangely enough, the darkness helped. It allowed him to bask in her warmth without revealing the sorrowfully resigned expression he knew must have covered her face.

When he finished, they sat in silence together, listening the echoes and re-echoes of his solemn pronouncement whispered at them from the metal walls. Never go back. Never go back. Never go back.

At last she drew in a deep breath, tightening her hand around his until he could feel the bones creak. This is it. The 'I'm sorry it had to be like this, Sam. Nice knowing you. Hope you get lucky and find another girl in your new life' speech. He wanted to close his eyes, but what was the point-- it was too dark to see anything but the faintest outline of her features.

But then she shifted, leaning closer to him, and the wan light slipping in from under the door momentarily lit up her face with a moonbeam glow. Her face wasn't sad, or even resigned. It was closed, hard with a furious emotion he could not name. Oh shit. She thought he was making it up, and now she was pissed at him for such a crappy excuse for breaking up with her!

He waved his casted arm in panic, though in the dark she probably couldn't see the defensive motion. "Please, Mikaela, you gotta believe me! I'm not making this up!" He sucked in a trembling breath, trying not to show how much it hurt that the cross expression on her face did not change (did you expect her to forget the sight of you kissing the tongue robot?). "It sucks that it has to be this way. Believe me, I hate it more than you can imagine. But even though I don't like it, Optimus is right-- I need to be at NEST, away from you, away from my family, so that the Decepticons don't hurt you when they come looking for me." He flexed his hand in hers-- she had not released it. "I can't go back with you, Mikaela. I'm really, really sorry--"

A hand lashed out in the dark and caught him full across the face in a ringing slap. He froze, stunned, and started to lift a hand to touch his stinging cheek-- but with a small, desperate noise, Mikaela slapped him again before he had the chance-- and with a tearless sob she threw herself into his arms, hugging him fiercely, hands fisted against his back.

"I can't believe you'd think I'd just go back without you!" She clutched him even tighter, burrowing her head against his chest, "I'm not a coward! I'm not afraid of those decepticreeps! So don't you dare try to tell me not to come with you!" She started to cry in earnest. Not the dainty, soundless tears of silent films, but the red-faced, snot-nosed, agonized globs of moisture that rolled thickly down the cheeks, past lips pulled up in a grimace of pain. "Samuel Witwicky-- I l-love you, and there's nothing you can do about it!" His ribs ached as she tried to hug him to pieces, tried to fuse their physical bodies together. "So don't you _dare_ go where I can't follow!"

Too stunned to speak, his arms came up and lightly folded themselves around her back. --But then her words sank in, and he pulled her as close as his broken arm would allow, then pulled her closer, his own hands fisting themselves in the back of her shirt.

"It's not up to me, Mikaela," his tongue said without his permission, voice emerging utterly flat. Dead. "No matter what, I'm not going to do something stupid like risk your life just to be around you, so I have to go along with them and live at the base. And I don't have the power to bring you with me, even if I was able to live with myself for taking you away from your life."

"W-what life?" She sniffed, pulling back just enough to look up into his face. "No money, no chance to go to college, a crappy job at a motorcycle repair shop?"

"America," he whispered in return, "Calilfornia. Gorcery shoping. Barbeques. Road trips. Friends....your father."

He gently wiped away the fat tear rolling slowly down her cheek with his thumb, and continued even more quietly, "Living. Being a normal person. That's what you'd be leaving behind. If you could come with me, which you can't. The whole 'but I can't do long-distance relationships' thing doesn't work with them. I have to go with the Autobots--" he swallowed thickly, "--and you have to go back and live a normal life for me. If not for yourself, do it for me, Mikaela." He ducked his head to whisper against her ear. "I love you too much not to let you go."

Abruptly she pushed herself away from him. It wasn't unexpected, but that didn't change how much the loss of that desperate contact hurt. But rather than turn away from him, tell him to get out, Mikaela seemed to gain a furious purpose. She sniffed, but not with more tears-- more like she was bracing herself up, stopping the flow, getting ready to plunge into the fray and do battle. She tossed her hair back behind her shoulders, rolled up to her knees on the bed, and began hurriedly fumbling at the neck of her shirt, making small, determined noises. Her hands shook so much that at first she merely pawed uselessly at the material, but then she latched onto the first button and slipped it free, pulling the neck of her shirt away to expose the milky expanse of her collar bone. Without pause, her hands moved to the next button, working that one free as well-- the fabric peeled away, revealing the twins curves of her breasts.

"Mikaela?" Sam squeaked in confusion. As though suddenly reminded of his presence, she lunged for him, hands tangling almost painfully into his hair, and pulled him into a harsh, passionate kiss, sighing into his mouth and running her tongue over his teeth, over the roof of his mouth, with a kind of feverous intensity. One hand freed itself and slipped up the hem of his shirt, clutching at the muscle beneath, but then almost as soon as she touched him she pulled her hands back again, returning them to the buttons of her shirt.

"Mikaela, what are you doing?"

Ignoring him completely, she thurst herself forward into his lap, wrapping her legs around his waist, and resumed the vigorous kissing, pulling open the next button of her shirt, uncovering the smooth, sensuous dip between her breasts.

All at once, his mind caught up with his body and the cause of her actions clicked into place.

"Mikaela!" He hissed, ignoring the way his own body responded to her eagerness, "We can't do this _now_!"

"Sure we can," she panted, silencing any further protests by locking her mouth onto his. She reached up and hooked her hands around the back of his neck, collapsing back onto the bed and bringing him down on top of her.

His heart felt ready to explode out of his chest. He needed her to stop kissing him, needed to stop himself from kissing her back, but he couldn't find the will to do either, especially when she hooked one foot around his calf and sensuously caressed the curve of his knee with her heel, the motion slow and devilishly enticing. At last, needing to come up for air, he broke away from the lip lock.

"You seem like--*pant*--you know--*pant*--what you're doing!"

"I don't," she punctuated the words by rolling her hips under his in a way that made him go wild with animal lust, "But this is the last chance we may get, so shut up and make love to me before I lose my nerve!"

She darted in for another kiss before he could reply, reaching for the next button on her shirt, the one which would finally free her breasts when pulled open.

Sam had never face a struggle quite as difficult before-- not only did both of them want what was happening (his libido danced with glee), but the only enemy to fight against was not a towering metal alien, but himself. It took every ounce of will power he possesed (stupid stupid stupid), but he managed-- barely-- to pull himself away before his mind simply said 'oh well!' and took a vacation for the next hour. Or two....or three. (shut UP!)

Rolling onto his side next to Mikaela to free his arms, he reached out and grabbed her hands with his, preventing them from continuing the disrobing process.

"No," he said, as seriously as he could muster, "No, as in not yes, okay? You DID go to that seminar in junior year on sexual harassment, didn't you?"

Mikaela groaned, but not in ecstasy. She threw her head back into the pillow the way she would bang her head into a wall, and shot him a nasty look.

"I'm not kidding around, Sam. I want to do this."

Swallow. "Well, I don't." And he didn't. Though physically his hormones were crying in outrage, mentally and emotionally he knew he had to put a stop to this. He waited until she saw that he was serious, the violent heaving of her chest slowing, and gingerly rolled back on top of her, propping himself up with his elbows. His hands found the first open button on her shirt.

"See, one of the things they talked about was 'in the moment' decisions like this," he murmured, leaning down and pressing his lips slowly, lovingly, into that little dip between her breasts. He felt her heart stutter in response, but he only pulled away and rebuttoned her shirt over the spot he had feathered with a kiss.

"I don't know how yet, but I _will_ figure something out. I promise you that."

His lips trailed a line up her skin, planting another soft kiss on her chest and redoing the next button over the intangible seal.

"This isn't goodbye--" Yet another kiss, even more lingering, higher up that the first. Slip the errant button back through its hole, watch her skin vanish beneath cloth. "So I'm not going to let you make it a goodbye."

Lips pressed beneath her collar bone, nose skimming silken softness. Redo the button, reset the clock on the countdown to seperation.

"'Sides--" he mumbled into the hollow of her throat (don't lick! don't lick!), "It would seriously suck if we ended up jynxing ourselves."

And he fastened the last button. Mikaela was only Mikaela once more, no longer a lashing well of need and lust. Her eyes, which had slipped closed sometime during his tender ministrations, opened once more, staring deep into his soul. In response, Sam folded his hands over her stomach and rested his chin on top of them, watching her watch him with a raised eyebrow. She snorted, face trembling with a dazzling variety of emotions.

Then, she simply laughed.

The last vestiges of tension in the room vanished. Grinning impishly, Sam rolled onto the bed beside her, shoved her out of the way, and wiggled beneath the covers. Still laughing breathlessly, she slid in beside him, allowing him to spoon against her back and cocoon the blankets more securely about them both.

"You really are a mood killer, Sam."

"Nuh-uh. Insulting me is totally not going to work. I'm sleeping here tonight and that's final." He lightly kissed her ear. "So if you don't like it, you can leave."

"I'm staying," she affirmated quietly, words holding layers of meaning.

Suddenly, Sam leaned up. "Oh! Almost forgot!" He reached for the yellow blanket still waded mournfully on the end of the bed and dragged it over them. "There. Now we're good."

And just because he owed her for pulling so many dirty tricks on him to get him hot, he slyly curled his leg around hers and languidly stroked the senstive inner edge of her calf.

"EEP! Sam!"

He only laughed, curling more tightly around her and pinning her arms to her side to keep her from pinching him the way he knew she intended to do. He caressed her even more slowly, drawing out the motion, lingering over the most ticklish spots. Mikaela writhed with helpless giggles.

Finally, after many more childish taunts and pay-backs had utterly exhausted their youthful energy, they both fell into the arms of slumber.

Neither dreamed.

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Jupiter. The god of thunder. The planet of storms.

At first glance, nothing but frozen ammonia and dust swirled through the tumultuous clouds, thrown into roaring storms thousands of miles wide by hydrogen winds whipping across the planet at unimaginable speeds. No creatures made their home here-- even if there was a spec of solid ground in which to take root, the vicious force of the endless storms would tear them into tiny, frozen shards in an instant.

But though there was no native life, there _was_ a visitor sailing the howling winds. A creature composed of solid-state metals so alien to the gaseous giant that it appeared as a splinter in the raging flesh of the sky, an anomoly unnoticed and unseen by the mindless elements.

Stronger than any earthen jet, able to withstand the 130-G pressure of sling-shotting around the eye of one of Jupiter's storms, Starscream basked in the directionless fury around him. Here was prefection of the universe, the ultimate outcome of the inivisble pattern guiding everything in existence. Not the will of some god; not the design of Cybertronian hands. Only the furthest point to which entrophy-- disorder-- could proceed.

As a scientist of his caliber, Starscream could admire the beauty of the planet around him and all that it embodied. Prefection through destruction; harmony in chaos.

Neither sentiment was understood by Megatron. The raging, self-deluded fool had been in power for far too long, become too comfortable with his own abilities to the point that he believed himself infallible. If only he could see the truth as Starscream did-- every structure eventually crumbled, every leader eventually fell. The meaningless pillars of authority, religion, control that sentient beings built up would all in time become like the beings themselves-- as alike to dust, crumbling, falling.

--Because not one of them embraced that change was inevitable, that the breaking and reforming of all things was inevitable. The only pillar that could survive the ravages of eternity must not be a pillar at all, but rather an amorphous gathering guided by one head who directed and mastered the changeless change.

Megatron did not understand this.

Prime did not understand this.

None of the great leaders of Cybertron had ever admitted to the truth they themselves had witnessed over the countless eons, shaping laws and social structures instead, never realizing that they were setting themselves up for the fall. The only way to be the master of change and to thereby assume uncontested rule was to control something so precious to the people being ruled that they would consent to any necessary change in order to get it.

Cybertron, and by extension all Cybertronians, were slowly dying. They had run out of energon. Without it, they could not search out a suitable star to implode and thus feed their dying race. A constant spiral, never ending, like the storms of Jupiter; they needed more energon to keep them from dying, and in order to get it they had to destroy a star. But in order to reach to a star to destroy it they needed energon-- which they could only harvest once they destroyed that star.

The Autobots knew this. The Decepticons knew this. Both also knew that the sole remaining machine in existence resided on earth, and that it was the key to saving every Cybertronian across the galaxy. The survival of the master race versus the termination of a disgusting species of warring bug-- to Starscream, it was really no choice at all. And if he could control the energon, he could replace Megatron as the unquestioned leader and expand his rule to their entire species. Everyone wanted to exist, after all.

Starscream had told Megatron of Soundwave's proposed plan. But the vile mech could not see the brilliance, the simplicity of it. His processor had become clouded by his hate of the Autobots, and he refused to take any course that did not involve destroying them in one-on-one combat.

Backwards fool.

Once more, Starscream played the primitive video clip forwarded to him from Soundwave. A crude drawing of a flesh bag engaging in a courting ritual with the photographic image of a human female, the same female he had seen in the company of the organic male who had destroyed the Allspark; a short video of said organic male attacking another of his species with a rectangular object that made a pitiful excuse for a weapon; the male and female together in a revolting the snippet of data did not provide any concrete clues to the male organic's whereabouts, it did reveal a possibly useful fact-- the male was emotionally attached to the female, possibly her mate. She could be used to draw him out.

Although Soundwave could not find any mention of the boy on any database or website-- save for the one from which the video had been culled-- the communications specialist _had_ uncovered a poorly hidden reference to the female. A reservation, under a disguised name and hidden deep within a military computer, for a plane flight from India to the United States. It was dated for approximately 32 hours from that exact moment in planetary rotation.

A tiny burst of sub-space data, and Starscream sent out a secret message to the Decepticon repairing the symbiote Ravage, giving the mech a program package to upload into Infiltrator's mind when the repairs had been completed. Very soon, his plan could be put into place.

Banking sharply through the clouds, Starscream rocketed closer to the eye wall of the storm, sending out a flurry of encoded messages to those within the ranks of the Decepticons that would be willing to betray Megatron. Slowly, responses started pinging from his reciever, each one the single glyph equilvalent of 'I accept'.

Five. Then nine. Then thirteen. And still Starscream's ranks swelled.

Apparently, they all valued survival much more than honor. Too bad Megatron didn't realize that.

Twenty. Twenty six.

His memory banks idly clicked through the information he had raided from the computer banks of dozens of human-termed 'world super powers': America, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran. All possesed nuclear weapons to one extent or another. But not just a handful, or even a few thousand. Between them, the five countries held more than 200,000 nuclear missiles, most of which had been secreted away in bunkers deep underground, never to be used.

Well, that would change. Starscream would not set off the weapons directly, oh no-- that would unite the humans and the Autobots. Instead, his purpose was to tear them apart, setting the two races at each others throats. When the time came, it would be by a _human_ hand that their world-- and the Autobots-- would be destroyed with their own weapons. And then nothing would stop him from putting the long dormant energon harvester to its original purpose.

Megatron would fall. Starscream would assume his rightful place as supreme leader, a leader intimately familiar with the very forces that would passively conspire to lift him on high.

Using the uncalculable force created by riding the storm, Starscream turned upwards and rocketed into space, racing easily beyond Jupiter's reaching field of gravity.

Prefection through destruction.

Harmony in chaos.

Let the games begin.

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Author's Note: Another exceedingly long chapter. I have GOT to stop doing this to myself. Sorry about the long wait-- once again, life got in the way. We had to install a french drain to de-swamp out backyard this weekend. The bad news-- it wrecked all of friday, saturday and part of sunday, thus the length of time it took to get this chapter up. The good news-- I GOT TO DRIVE A BACK HOE!!! *Squee* It was really awesome--like a giant toy. So cool.

In any case, on to more serious matters. First, in response to a few questions, this story will continue past Sam's move to NEST, though so much will be going on in the meantime that he never really has the chance to 'settle in'....

Secondly, Mikaela will not be killed off, though there will be much angst revolving around her in future chapters-- and she WILL eventually be together with Sam. I think you'll like the plan he comes up with to get them together. Thirdly, this story will not involve sex in any way, shape, or form, either by directly writing it out or by referring to it. I don't do pornography, people. Hench the rating on this story.

And lastly, Bumblebee has been up to some very sneaky things recently.....


	9. Finding Fathers, Losing Friends

Time is relative, according to Einstein. Or at least, that's what Sam thought he remembered from his speed-read of a college astronomy text book. He couldn't remember much from that mental breakdown incident-- most of the knowledge stuffed into his brain had vanished alongside the Cybertronian symbols-- but one of the things he _did_ remember involved the theory that time is only as long or as short as you make it.

Before, Sam had laughed at that. As far as he could tell, an hour was an hour no matter how you looked at it. But when faced with the final day he had to spend with the most important humans in his life, every minute became as precious as gold-- and as fleeting as popcorn on movie night. If only it hadn't taken losing almost everthing that mattered in his life to make him see that Einstein wasn't a crack pot after all.

From the moment he woke up (at 7am, unable to bear wasting one more second on sleep) he had his whole day planned out. It was a simple plan, really-- corral his parents and Mikaela all into the same room (pre-stocked with lots of junk food), lock the door, swallow the key, and refuse to come out until a marine broke down the door. Well, maybe everything but the swallowing the key part. He supposed he could just hide it, instead.

Yet as he quietly slipped out of bed, carefull not to jostle a still sleeping Mikaela, he ran across the first pot hole in his fool-proof plan. Once out in the lighted hallway, it would be impossible to resist reading the sharpie message tattooed into his cast. The night before, when losing his girlfriend had seemed days away (though still a knife of restless agony in his gut), he would have devoured it with his eyes in an instant. But now....

Now, he couldn't bear to read it. He wanted to savor her last written words to him, the way he had wanted to keep Bumblebee's text messages when he'd been convinced that he would never see his best friend again. Even if the words adorning his cast merely formed one long rant about how dorky he was, they would still serve-- like a message in a bottle-- to link him to Mikaela, no matter how great the distance between them. If he could have described it, Sam would have compared it to a homeless kid getting a christmas present with a giant bow on top. The only present they had ever recieved. Perhaps they would carry it around with them for days, simply basking in the glow of having one at all. They might never open it, in fact, so fearful were they of the magic finally ending.

For the moment, Sam settled for wrapping his Bumblebee blanket around the cast, though it was too bulky a solution to use in the long term. Stealing softly from the room, Sam left Mikaela to sleep and went to change his clothes. It was difficult to keep the writing on his cast covered while changing his shirt and washing his face in the tiny sink, but somehow he managed it (though not without soaking the blanket). Dressed in clean clothes, hair brushed, teeth brushed, he no longer felt quite so much like something found sleeping in a cardboard box outside. Rewrapping the soggy blanket around his arm once more, he set off towards the infirmary, carrying the bundled appendage in his other arm like an exceedingly grungy pillow. Hopefully they would have a stash of those shower coverings made to keep bandages dry that he could use as a slip cover.

Though he'd feared that no one would be staffing the infirmary at such an hour, the lights were on within and the door swung open easily at his touch. Not quite brave enough to venture into the labyrinth beyond unannounced, he stuck his head around the doorway and called, "Wilma, I'm home!"

Mirroring his posture, a pony-tailed head leaned back into view around the door of the office, glanced at him, and stared.

"Oh, Sam!" the doctor from the night before (Judy? Jewel? Linda?) called back in surprise. The head disappeared, and a moment later she stepped out of the office into the infirmary proper, waving him in.

At the sight of her rumpled lab coat, a pang of guilt warbled through his chest. "Sorry. Am I interrupting you?"

He hoped not. She was cute, and she looked like she could use a nap. But then again, he had an emergency on his hands. Her eyes went to the blanket around his arm, and she raised a questioning eyebrow. Not quite bold enough to own up to his obsessive need to save a few Sharpie scribbles, he could only give a roundabout shrug in response, hoping that would be enough of an answer.

When she saw that he had no plans to elaborate, she shook her head in answer to his question and motioned for him to follow her to the office.

"You're not interrupting, Sam. I'm just going through some paper work."

"Don't like the slop they serve for breakfast in the mess hall?"

She turned her head to give him a patient smile. "I normally work the graveyard shift, Sam, but right now we're a little understaffed, so most of the time I end up staying longer than I'm assigned to. When you came in I was wrapping everything up and preparing to go to bed," her smile faded, expression becoming quizzical, almost worried, "I expected to see you hours ago, actually."

Sam twitched, and for a moment paused in his stride as he rounded the office door. Apparently, Mikaela wasn't the only one with hidden talents. _All_ women must have had untapped potential as mind-readers; there was no other way she could have known about his spacey, borderline psychotic dilemma of needing to keep his cast covered.

But then she went on, "The pain meds should have worn off long ago, and you left the additional ones I gave you on the bed. So unless you have a stash of illegal narcotics somewhere-- which I doubt, seeing as how you're far too lucid to be doped up-- you ought to be screaming in pain right now."

Brushing the remains of sleep from his mind like cobwebs, he frowned, pulling his bundled arm a little more tightly to his chest. Had she really given him more happy pills to take with him? Kicking his brain into high gear, he combed his memory of the night before and came up with a fuzzy snapshot of an orange pill bottle being pressed into his hand-- and then being promptly abandoned in favor of spamming a moody Bumblebee. Oops.

But then the implications of his own actions hit him, and he slowed to a stop. He _had_ felt the medication wearing off at the end of his chat (knock-down, drag-out, verbal fight) with Optimus, and then had begun to wobble deliriously with the resurgent pain right before he launched himself at the guard aiming to kill at Bumblebee (--_stay away from him!--)._ Whatever Rachet had drugged him with must have packed some serious pain-killing power; the broken bones in his arms still ached, occasionally flaring with a stab of pain, but the agony no longer had his head between its jaws. More like it had shrunken and was now reduced to nibbling at his ankles.

Seriously-- _powerful_.

Sam paused before her desk, waiting to gather his thoughts while she rooted around in one of the drawers.

"Well, I did get a shot of something really good--" she jerked her head up, eyes widening in surprise before sharpening to narrowed slits of flint. Sam blanched at her look, sorely tempted to kick himself for blurting out the exact words to make him seem like a heroin junky. "No, wait! It's not what you think! This...other doctor, he gave me something for my arm. A 'pain reliever combined with a mild sedative', I think he called it."

The look of hardened fury marring her features didn't change. She shut the drawer with a snap, dropping a haphazardly stuffed folder onto the desk.

"Sam, I would think you were old enough not to let any random guy shoot you up with something that could possibly be illegal or even deadly. If you need something for the pain, you come to one of us-- as in, _a licensed medical professional_."

Sam took a prudent step back, holding up a hand to ward off another tongue lashing."Woah, hold on! A couple things, okay? One-- I'm not dead, so I don't think it was deadly. Two, I think this 'guy' probably has the equivalent of a medical license where he comes from, and three, I didn't really have any say in the matter. He just _did it_."

Too late he realized that he shouldn't have referred, even indirectly, to the alien vistor. He remembered Mikaela saying something about Rachet coming to find him to check his arm, and the doctor hadn't seemed too surprised when Mikaela mentioned the robot the night before, but there was always the chance that she _hadn't_ heard them discussing the aliens, _hadn't_ seen Rachet during his quest, and had _no idea _there were things from beyond the stars squatting in the cargo bay. In which case he was screwed.

Her gaze softened, but only a little. More in gruding acceptance than in relief, however.

"You're talking about that neon robot, right? The one with no concept of personal space?"

A relieved grin broke out over his own face. Crisis avoided.

"Yep. That's the one. He's, like, their medic or something."

"And what prompted this administration of unapproved drugs?"

Gulp. "Uh....I, um, I kinda got into a fight."

"A fight." It wasn't a question; the flat quality to her voice made it a threat.

"Well..." he made a wishy-washy motion with his hand, then fumbled to catch a corner of the blanket that sagged free of its static cling and started to unravel the entire cast shield. "Not really a fight. More like a disagreement over how to handle a tense situation-- but that's cool, because no one hit anyone else and the whole thing ended without any black eyes. But I must have stressed my arm, because it started hurting like hell--"

"Oh dear." She scrubbed a hand across her face, straightening and gathering up the folder. As she strode around the desk towards him, he glimpsed his own name printed onto the tab. "Well, we better go x-ray your arm again to make sure nothing was knocked out of alignment. Come on."

Sam started to protest, started to point out that his arm wasn't blazing with pain, which must have meant that everything was still in place, but decided it probably would result in less bodily injury if he just went along with it.

Once more he sat himself in the hard plastic chair before the portable machine, suited up with a giant lead bib to keep him from turning into a three-headed mutant from the radiation, and lined his plastered arm up under the scanner. Despite his feeble protest, she's insisted on the removal of the blanket, so he endured the entire process with his eyes clamped shut. The machine whirred, spat out a burst of invisible energy at his arm, then fell silent, processing. Hearing the rustling of the doctor's lab coat as she moved to check the results, he called, "Can I have my security blanket back now?"

Her voice came back puzzled. "No. The machine must be on the fritz-- this one didn't come out. Hold on, I'll have to do another scan."

Again the machine clunked and buzzed, and though he knew-- intellectually-- that he should have felt nothing, the flesh still prickled beneath his cast.

With a click and a sighing noise, the machine switched off. "Okay. Now I'm done."

"Great!" He rose from his chair, groping around blindly. "Um, where did you put that blanket again?"

"Here. This will work better at supporting your arm."

Sam opened his mouth to object that he didn't want support-- he had wandered down in the first place looking for some sort of water-proof hair net for casts-- but his objections died in his throat as she slipped his arm through a thick fold of fabric and hooked a strap over his head.

"There."

Cautiously he cracked open one eye, then gazed in relief at the cobalt blue sling craddling his arm to his chest. Perfect.

He glanced up to offer a few embarassed thanks (so obvious, why didn't I think of that?), but found the doctor scowling in puzzlement at the x-ray, holding it up to the light for a better view.

"Something up?"

"This is....very strange."

Alarm bells began to go off inside his head, though the fact that his arm didn't have him writhing around on the floor mitigated some of the instinctual fear that came with doctors saying _anything_ was 'strange'. He sidled up behind her, studying the misty image of his bones over her shoulder.

"What? It looks like an arm to me."

Striding forward, she slipped the x-ray into the crack of the small light board against the wall, flipping the switch to start it up. Ultra white light flooded through the images, causing them to glow. Without a word, she picked up his folder once more, pulled out another x-ray, and stuck it up beside the first.

"This is you from last night," she pointed to the image drawn from the folder, indicating the dark lines where his bones had fractured. "See how clear these breaks are? Like they were drawn with a marker?"

"Yeah...." He still couldn't see where this was going, but her lack of a direct answer sent his heart doing a quick-step inside his rib cage.

"And this is you right now," her finger moved over the one taken moments before, circling the two identical breaks in the air. "See the haziness between the edges of the broken bones?"

He squinted at the images, leaning in for a closer look. The marker edge had attained a certain level of fuzziness, but nothing that would have drawn his attention. He shrugged. "Yeah? So?"

"This fog-like substance is actually thousands of microscopic bone bridges being formed between the two broken halves to reconnect them. Sam," she turned to face him completely, her eyebrows drawing together over the bridge of her nose. "This x-ray shows what a broken bone should look like after at _least_ a week of healing. You've only had that cast on for less than twelve hours."

A shiver of ghostly premonition slithered down his spine, but he restrained it from spreading to the rest of his body by holding onto a logical contradiction.

"Maybe this one is messed up too. You said the other one was," he pointed out reasonably.

But the doctor only shook her head.

"Not likely. This is actually a very clear image, as far as x-rays go. The other one didn't come out at all." She reached around behind the machine, extracting another tinted sheet of plastic. At the sight of it, his good hand went numb and unable to take it from her grasp. He could only stare, dumbfounded, as she held it out for his inspection.

"Maybe your machine is on the fritz?" he heard himself ask.

"Quite possibly. Only interference from another radiation source could make the image come out this way, though. They must be testing a new piece of technology near here," she frowned, obviously not very convinced by her own words.

Sam couldn't nod. He couldn't swallow.

The x-ray still showed his arm. Barely. The image had become skewed, as though it were a reflection in a pond rent by violent ripples. Swirls and eddies of white, like the catacombs of spiders, stretched from one edge to another, obscuring the view of his bones. But none of that caused the floor to drop out from under his feet. None of that sent tremors scurrying down his limbs. No, the true cause of his sudden fear had nothing to do with what the doctor had seen, but what she _hadn't _seen.

How was she to know that interlaced through the curls of white fog glimmered complex whorls of alien runes?

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

"Okay, Sam. Get a grip. Come back to reality, plant your feet on the ground, think it through. Right."

Spring up from the bed, pace restlessly across the floor. Three steps, turn, repeat.

"This is NOT like what happened last time. Nothing like it at all."

Stop at the door, stare at it for a moment before realizing it _is_ a door, turn and shuffle back to the bed.

"For one thing, I'm not having random spaz moments. There, see? Already not the same. And for another thing, those weren't the same symbols."

Turn to sit on the bed. Flop diagonally across its length, bang head on pillow. Snatch up pillow, wad it into a ball, chuck it across the room. Stand, pace, repeat.

"Not the same symbols. Not the same symbols. Whatever that allspark shard did to me stopped happening after I died and had that freaky dream. I found the Matrix, saved Optimus, done. End of story. No more freaky knowledge, no more symbols."

And just because he could think of nothing better to do, Sam went and fetched his pillow from where he had tossed it into a wall and pitched it back onto his bed.

"So this can't be about me. Whatever that was, it must have come from the Autotbots. I mean, Simmons even said they give off ungodly amounts of alien radiation, so the ship must be saturated with it by now. Makes sense that the machine would pick up on it at some point."

He moved to stand in front of the mirror and played with spiking up his hair for a moment, then stepped closer, braced his hands on the tiny sink, and peered deep into the pupil of each eye. Not even _his_ paranoid mind could imagine that he saw anything but his own reflection printed on their concave surfaces.

"Besides, it only did it that one time. The other two scans came out clean, no problems at all. So it can't be me."

He felt the skin of his face, patted the top of his head, held two fingers to his neck and counted his heart beats, even put his nose to one shoulder and sniffed for BO. Nothing out of the ordinary, except perhaps for needing a shower.

"They scanned me before I even got on the ship. I'm clean-- well, mostly. We're all stewing in their radiation most of the time, so there's usually at least _some_ leftovers to pick up on. That must be it-- I've got enough of it dripping off me that it interrupted the machine. There's nothing freaky going on inside me. _Nothing_."

He paused, listening to the mocking voices of the walls echo _'nothing' _into the silence.

No matter how much he strove to deny it, _nothing_ did not bend broken bones. If he said it aloud enough times, he could probably convince himself that the symbols on the x-ray had been caused by the close proximity of so many aliens leeching radiation into the very walls. (Non-harmful radiation, but still). Miraculous healing could not be as easily ignored.

"There's no wonder drug to fix bones," he whispered past unmoving lips, tugging at his sling. This time, he had no urge whatsoever to pull it aside. Any romance had been killed by unadulterated panic. "Not on earth, at least."

He paused, catching the whiff of an idea, and repeated, "Not on earth."

---and suddenly, listening to his own words reverberate around the inside of his skull, the answer washed over him like a cool, relieving spring.

"Duh! Rachet!" He danced away across the floor, chanting happily 'Rachet--Rachet--Rachet!'. "Alien medical wizard probably pumped me full of a bone-healing wonder drug! Thank you, thank you, _thank you_! Ha-Ha!"

He tried to jump into the air and click his heels, failed spectacularly, and hopped around on one foot when he stumbled to keep from falling. It all made sense, now-- an overwhelming alien presence had caused the x-ray to fritz, and Rachet's amazing powers of all things medically related had sped up the healing of his arm. He wasn't having a freaky, alien-artifact-related relapse after all. At the moment he felt so giddy he almost ran from the room, waltzed into the cargo bay, and kissed the annoying neon robot right on the lips. Being the confirmed source for his bout of healing almost made up for spilling the beans and antagonizing his parents. Almost.

Striding (skipping) back to his bed, he gathered up his coat and slung it over one shoulder. Whistling slightly (though he was pants at whistling), he all but glided from the room, feeling lighter than he had in days. He _wasn't_ having a relapse. He _wasn't _going crazy again. Life was good. Now everything would go back to normal; he would kiss the girl, sweep her off her feet, and ride into the sunset where they would live happily ever af--

He froze in the hallway, sputtering whistle dying on his lips.

Every shred of happy-go-lucky giddiness faded and died, drying into sizzling little embers. Not having his brain be hijacked again by freaky alien symbols was fantastic, but it meant diddly-squat when compared with the larger picture. Like a mouse infestation verus an elephant infestation; the elephants were much more adept at wrecking everything in sight. According to Thatcher, he only had until tomorrow morning to say goodbye. Only one day, 24 hours.

In that moment, bending over with the pain twisting like a spear through his gut, he suddenly realized how very grateful he was to Optimus for trying to keep the knowledge from him until the last possible instant. He wouldn't have been able to deal with such pain-- greater by several orders of magnitude than the pain of a broken arm-- for a whole week. It would have destroyed him. He abruptly sympathized with those people forced to bear up under the news that someone they loved only had a few months left to live. How do you cram a lifetime of laughter and love into a few weeks? A few days? A few _hours_?

Sam knew he needed to get started on his plan to lock them all in the same room immediately. It would be a selfish thing to do, but he felt that he had every right to be selfish, considering. But his promise to Mikaela held him back with a faint glimmer of hope. He was only human, and as a human he couldn't help but want to bring her with him, no matter how much she might have ended up hating him for it years later. There had to be a way, a loop hole, buried deep within military regulations that would give them reason to grant her security clearance. Something to do with the fact that she'd been through every part of mess alongside him, even if she wasn't the one the Decepticons would do anything to hunt down and kill. Maybe if he dug deep enough he could make the case that she needed protection too?

Sorrowful longing not to lose a single moment with his family and his girlfriend directed him to head straight to breakfast (where they would undoubtably be, looking for him), hug them senseless, and proceed to glue himself to them for the rest of the day. And night. But a siren song of hope called him to use at least an hour of two of his remaining time (--_too long, no time to spare_--) in search of a way to force them to let Mikaela come along.

The offices, he knew from his time with the shrink, were on the third level. So hesitantly, reluctantly, he turned in that direction. Slowly he picked up speed as he moved further and further away from the mess hall until he was thundering down the hallways, crashing through doors and leaping up three steps at a time. When he reached the third level he slowed to a crawl, knowing he had to be sneaky not to get caught in someone's office and thrown out. He tried the knobs of every door he came to, but most of the dinky little offices (unoccupied, their worker bees gobbling down their food) revealed a distressing lack of books, regulation books or otherwise. Where was a stickler for the rules when you needed one?

Finally, the fifth unlocked door he came to eased open into a dark, cramped office indentical in almost every way to all the others on the hall. Except _this _particular office boasted of a bookshelf along one wall, packed full of books the size of paving slabs and binders with rings as big around as plates. Not a single one of them looked remotely interesting. Jackpot.

Sneaking a glance down the hallway on either side, Sam slipped into the room and closed the door behind him, flicking on the lights. He moved immediately towards the books, thought better of leaving an unprotected door at his back, and pushed the swivel chair tucked beneath the desk under the handle. He'd seen people do the same thing in movies-- though he had no idea how the technique was supposed to work, when the hero needed it a wedged chair had stopped everything from ax murderers to summoned demons. He supposed it would do at least as well at a holding a pencil-pusher at bay.

Now to find a hand book on military regulations. Most of the binders shouldering each other out of the way on the shelves were unlabeled, and he was forced to flip through them to get an idea of what they were about. Emergency protocols. Navigation systems. Weapons maintenance. Personel records. Ship's logs.

As he carefully replaced each dead end back where he had extracted it from the shelf, a niggle of fear began to worm its way through his mind. This wasn't just some harmless prank that would rouse a few chuckles and scolding fingers; for all he knew, some of the information contained within the books and binders could have been top secret, and here was zero-clearance Sam riffling through them without a second thought. If he was caught, he could be charged with all sorts of mind-numbingly terrible things, up to and including spying, since technically he was no longer an American citizen. The bare possibility would have reduced a lesser man to sobbing whimpers, but at the moment Sam felt so completely fed up with all the manure that had been dumped on him in the past few days that he almost felt brave enough to give the President the finger if need be. So rather than dashing from the room in fear, he gamely continued with his search, bouyed by the fact that the door had been unlocked and therefore shouldn't contain anything _too_ sensitive.

At last he hit paydirt. It figured that the heaviest book on the shelf, one that could have served as a counterweight for a crane, contained those things-- such as basic military regulations-- that Sam needed.

With one last apprehensive glance towards the door, he hauled the book to the desk and went to sit down, remembered that he'd used the chair to bar the door, and sat against one wall instead. Bracing himself up with a lungful of stale air, he cracked open the enormous volume and began to read.

After an incalculable span of time spent hunched over the paper and ink monolith putting his legs to sleep, Sam started to suspect that if he read the book in his lap cover to cover he would find exactly what he sought. The problem, however, stemmed from the fact that a book with pages numbering into the two thousands could not be read at a single stretch, or even in a single day. And merely skimming the onion-skin pages yielded nothing of value.

Oh, sure. There were numerous references to security clearance-- the different levels, what each meant, what could be accessed at various times by various people, how clearance worked in emergency situations, how to screen someone for clearance. When he saw the headings over the last two he cheered silently, confident that contained beneath them would be a veritable 'Here's how to solve the Mikaela problem' paragraph, written especially for desperate boyfriends. Not only was he convinced that the situation in general could be classified as an 'emergency', the topic of security screening should have listed special circumstances for the granting of clearance. But after reading both and finding no solution, he grudgingly admitted that the writer probably hadn't thought of including 'alien attack' under the emergency heading. And the tips on granting clearance only listed common tricks a spy/ serial killer would use to make his record appear squeaky clean. Again, useless.

Just as he folded the book shut in preparation of hunting down another, the door handle rattled.

The super spy double-oh-zero, as the twins had labeled him, would have immediately leapt up, put the book back, and found somewhere to hide where the returning desk jockey would never find him until he leapt out and gave the guy a Vulcan nerve pinch. But regular old Sam only froze, heart leaping into a sprint, and continued sitting with the evidence of his trespassing open on his lap. His eyes glued themself to the door knob, and he prayed that he had only imagined it twist before. No such luck.

The handle twisted again, accompanied this time by a fist banging on the other side of the door.

"Hey! Matrix boy! You in there?"

The voice jarred him from his deer-in-the-headlights impression. He leapt to his feet, book tumbling unceremoniously to the floor, and bee-lined for the desk, wondering if the knee space were big enough to hide him. But before he could reach his intended cover, the door burst inward and rebounded from the wall, sending the chair skittering across the room.

Simmons poked his head around the corner and pinned him with a cold stare.

"Alright, you little felon. You're not supposed to be in here."

Deciding it would probably work to his favor to play up the innocent card and follow the advice of career burgulars (who insisted that looking like you belonged there was the best method for getting away scot free), Sam only shrugged, stuffing his free hand deep into his pocket.

"Well that's funny, because the door was unlocked. Weird, huh? It's almost like they're inviting you to come right on in!" As he spoke, he carefully nudged the rule book out of sight with the toe of one shoe.

But the ex-agent only sneered. "You're not as stupid as you try to pretend you are. We _both_ know you shouldn't be snooping around in here."

Simmons stepped farther into the room, looking slightly nervous himself as he glanced around the tiny office. Almost as if he didn't want to be caught there, either. Sam's instincts usually led him down the right path (--_drew him to a beat up camaro with racing stripes_--), so he changed tactics at their insistence.

"I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be too happy to find you down here, either. I mean, hey, I've got everything going for me right now-- I'm a kid, I have a broken arm, and I have a bunch of big alien friends who would probably break me out of prison if they chucked me in there," he jerked his chin at the sallow faced man, "So who do you think would come out of it worse if you went skipping up to them and told them you found me in here, me or you?"

But to his consternation, Simmons only turned to face him straight on, smiling crookedly. "You like playing hard ball, heh? Too bad you forgot that I have it in with _the man_-- I used to work for them, remember?"

"Yeah, and they fired you because you're an _obsessive jerk_, leaving you with no where to go but back to your mom and a job working in her sandwich shop. No offense."

Simmon's left eye twitched. _Ouch_. Sam -- 1, Bumblebee-torturing nutcase -- 0.

"I _told_ you--" the ex-agent pointed a righteous finger at Sam, "--my mother lives with _me_, not the other way around!" And he glanced out the door, as though fearful that someone were eavesdropping in the hallway. Lowering his voice, but not his finger, he continued, "But if you're going to be so immature about it, I guess I can reach deep into the goodness of my heart and not report you to the highest authoriy."

"Gee, thanks," Sam rolled his eyes, moving towards the still open door. Now that he had called Simmons' bluff it was time to make his dramatic exit. He could always come back later to find that other book. But the ex-agent moved to block him, rubbing his hands with glee. Not Good.

"Not so fast, Sammy. I may be merciful enough not to report you to the highest authority, but I _will _report you to your mother."

Sam froze. In his quest to find a loop hole for Mikaela, all thoughts of his parents had been driven to the back of his mind.

"....You wouldn't."

"I can, and I will. She's the one who sent me after you in the first place," he shivered dramatically, "That woman is about nine different types of scary."

"Hey! You leave her out of this! I only insult you, not your mother." Then, "Wait. What did she threaten you with to get you down here?"

Simmons rolled his eyes at Sam in a parody of his earlier gesture, though the motion was so extreme it was a wonder the beady little things didn't get stuck that way. He turned back towards the door, waving for Sam to follow him.

"Let's just say she threatened to make me less of a man if I didn't come bring you down to lunch before they start unloading the ship."

Hearing that his mom had threatened the loopy, thong-wearing psycho enough to make him shake in his boots like a little girl heartened Sam considerably, causing a goofy grin to break out over his face. But at the word 'lunch' it faltered-- he glanced at his watch, twitching with horror when he realized that he'd wasted almost five of his precious 24 hours without even realizing it. And he still had not come up with a solution.

When his mind caught up with the rest of Simmon's words he blinked, letting his watch arm fall and coming to a stop.

"Hold up. Unloading the ship? Are we making a pit stop or something?"

Simmons paused, hand on the doorframe, and leaned out into the hall to check for any lingering witnesses. Finding none, he twisted his head to look at Sam over his shoulder, his expression conveying exasperation and something that might have been compassion. But the touch of sympathy traced along his features must have been a trick of the light, for it faded the next moment into a disdainful sneer.

"You seem to have a very bad habit of not paying attention, Sammy-boy. Or didn't your 'big alien friends' tell you that they recieved an urgent call from NEST a few hours ago and they're making us all get out at the next port?"

"A call? About what? Why do we have to leave early?"

But Simmons only turned away from him with a small chuckle, ducking out into the hallway.

"I guess you're not as buddy-buddy with them as you thought you were, matrix boy!"

Simmons -- 1, Sam -- 1.

The expertly placed blow struck home, causing Sam to flinch. His secret fear, the one he kept hidden deep inside under lock and key, had always been that the aliens only tolerated his presence to humor him. At times they confided in him, sure, but more often than not they spoke over his head in their own language, purposefully excluding him from the conversation. And maybe Bee felt some genuine affection for him (though probably no where near as much as Sam did for the alien), but how long would it be before the novelty of having a human pet around would begin to wear off? How long before they got tired of risking their lives for a short-lived organic that burped and sweat and did all sorts of disgusting things, one that had neither their strength nor their intelligence? Perhaps in the moment, when he carried the Allspark or held the key to saving their leader, they thought him interesting, but what would happen when they came to realize that he was really as ignorant and uninteresting as dirt? Would they cast him aside outright, or would he slowly be locked out of the group, included out of duty rather than friendship like that little pet that looked so cute as a baby but grew up to be ugly and annoying?

Would there come a time when Bee no longer wanted to be his friend?

Sam didn't realize he had stopped walking until Simmons ducked his head back around the door and whistled. "Yo! Sammy-boy! Let's go already!"

"Go stick your head in a toilet and flush twice," Sam advised sagely, numbly following the ex-agent out the door. Swallowing back the beginnings of an immature sulk, he forced himself to admit that he had no right to expect the Autobots to inform him of every little detail of their doings. The adult reasoning didn't stop him from shriveling a little on the inside at the news, though.

"Ouch. I'm mortally wounded," Simmons sniped back, "Can't think up a better come back, Sammy-boy?"

Sam practiced breathing evenly, forcing away the walls that tried to tunnel in on him (--_no more time, no more time_--). "How about you call me Sam and I call you by _your_ real name?" he suggested.

"You don't know my first name."

Sam nodded. "True. But I didn't say 'first' name. See, your _real_ name is 'ass-hole'."

"Oh no. He called me an asshole. I'm so upset," Simmons dead-panned, leading him away from the third level (away from the only glimmer of hope) and along the often trod route to the mess hall.

"No, it works," Sam insisted (how much longer? Six hours? Three? _One?_), "Because your bosses _totally _made you their bitch."

Sam-- 2, Simmons-- 1.

He hadn't realized that he'd begun walking ahead of the ex-agent until a hand smacked him in the back of the head. Hard.

"You watch your mouth, kid!"

"Or what? I have a thirty-foot-tall robot and I'm not afraid to use it."

"Or I'll sic your mother on you."

"She hates your guts."

"Yeah, but that room mate of yours_ worships _me. I'm sure I could use him to make your life living hell."

Just 'room mate'. No 'ex-' attached as a prefix. Once more his gut folded itself into painful little knots at the reminder of all he was leaving behind. Inane little questions began to flood his mind at the mention of college life: would he be able to go back to school in India, or would he have to stay on base all the time? Would he take a few of those online courses? Would he be forced to study politics and dipolmacy, the two subjects that he had almost flunked in school? Would there be any kids his age to hang out with (once he stopped pouting in his room)? Were there any kids at all? Did _anyone_ stay there all the time, or would he be a one-man human island in a sea of barbed wire and aliens?

Sam thought about pointing out that Leo could only be used as a pestering device until they made landfall, but he didn't want Simmons to come back with a quip about exactly how many hours he had left with his family. He wanted to pretend he had forever and not spend every second with them staring intently at his watch, wishing he could make it run backwards. So instead he merely shrugged, letting the chain of banter drop.

Apparently, Simmons had sensed the direction of his thoughts. For a moment the taller man's eyes softened with the same disturbing touch of sympathy as his gaze slid across to take in Sam's stony profile. But when Sam turned to meet his stare it vanished again, morphing into a leer.

"So are you going to just stand there, or are you going to go eat lunch with your hotty girlfriend?"

Sam started, suddenly realizing that they had made it all the way back to the mess hall and stood facing the open doorway. They must have occupied the same spot for a while-- the crewmen that passed by going into lunch flung strange looks in their direction. He forced away the thought that the evil ex-agent had stood with him in silence while his mind had gibbered and paced in anxious little circles around the inside his skull. There was no way someone who had ordered Bumblebee tortured could do something even remotely approaching nice. Simmons must have been taken over by a body snatcher. He would have to remember to ask Bee if he'd encountered any body snatchers before.

"Yeah. I think I'll go do that, thanks."

Sam struck out boldly for the mess hall, horrified to find the ex-agent keeping pace with him. At his look of imminent doom, Simmons snorted explosively.

"Despite what your puny little mind may concieve, I do not, in fact, run on genius alone."

Stiffening his spine and deciding to be the better person, Sam let the invitation for argument fizzle away in silence, stepping up and loading his tray with food. None of it looked appetizing, and he felt more apt to vomit from nerves than to stuff his face, but he still took generous helpings of everything. Make the most of his free meal pass, and all.

Tray filled, cup overflowing with Coke, he turned to search out his parents, hoping that Mikaela was sitting nearby so he didn't have to drag her over by the seat of her pants (although that presented some interesting possibilities-- stop it!). But for once the stars were aligned in his favor, and he found them reserving a table for themselves by sheer force of personality, accompanied at times by little threatening growls to scare off those who would have sat in the empty seat. _His_ seat, right beside Mikaela.

Forcing himself not to run, he weaved his way through the lunchtime crush of people towards them, smiling infectously as they spotted his approach.

His mother stood up, waving to him. He would have waved back except for the encumbering tray, so he settled for smiling wider and gesturing that his arms were full. But when she cupped a hand around her mouth and yelled, he realized she wasn't motioning only to him.

"Sam! There you are, honey! Tell Simon to get his narrow little butt over here!"

Simmons, who had ended up behind him in the tangle of people, paled considerably. Sam's smile turned predatory.

"Hey, Simon. I think she wants to talk to you."

A pleading gaze met his. "Come on, take pity on a guy!"

Sam only snorted with laughter, striking out for the three people that meant the most to him in the world. "Not a chance."

Before he could even put his plate down, his parents and Mikaela had him crushed into three simultaneous hugs. He couldn't work up the will to be embarassed, not when he was suddenly struggling not to cry (--no time left, blink and they're gone--). His mother rocked him back and forth as much as she was able with two other people holding onto him, wailing into his shoulder, "Oh my little booty boy! What am I going to do without you?" His father, more restrained, pulled him into a hard hug before releasing him to his mother, clamping one hand around his mom-less shoulder and squeezing tightly.

Mikaela feathered a kiss to his cheek, slipping her hand into his. "Think you have enough food, Sam?"

"Well, you know," he ground out, face still smushed up against his mother in a way that distorted the words, "I need a lot if I'm going to try to feed an army."

At the mention of food his mother pulled back, holding him at arms length and examining him with a critical (tear-filled) eye.

"It's a good thing you have a healthy appetite. You'll need your strength if you're going to be running around after pyramid-wrecking robots all day."

Everyone slowly filtered back to their places, obviously unwilling to let go, and Sam flopped into his designated spot. His eyes flicked to Simmons, who turned in preparation to bolt.

"Is that what Simon told you, mom? Cause if he did, he's a liar. I'm going with the Autobots to protect all of us from the Decepticons, not to chase after them. That's Optimus and the others' job. I'm just the housewife."

Roused at the distorted name of the ex-agent, his mother sat up straighter in her chair and honed in on the retreating back with precision aim. It must have been a mom thing, being able to pin-point guilt at a hundred paces.

"You get back here, Mr. Sneaky!" she yelled to him. Sam covered his mouth to contain his laughter as Simmons froze in his tracks, shoulders hitching a little higher, and slowly turned to face his mother with a plastic grin on his face. Sam realized he had been wrong. Simmons wasn't a government bitch-- he was _Judy Witwicky's _bitch. He dug his fingers more securely into his upper lip, chest heaving, and noticed Mikaela covering her own bout of giggles by pretending to search through her purse. He'd have to weasel the story of what, exactly, she had threatened the ex-agent with out of her some day--

---and every bubble of laughter abruptly died in his throat, grin dissapating as quickly as it had come. There wouldn't be 'some day' to hear the doubtlessly amusing story. He only had _this_ day, whatever few hours were left of it.

Simmons slowly turned around to face their table, grinning toothily at his mother, eye twitching once more.

"Ah. Mrs. Witwicky! What can I do for you?"

"You weren't very nice to us when we met, especially since your guys trampled my garden and carted off my dog!"

"And arrested us. Don't forget that," Sam pointed out helpfully, trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, that the floor wasn't tilting underneath of him again.

"And arrested us," she added. "But I'm a big enough person to forgive you, and I wanted to thank you for finding my Sam."

Oh yeah. The eye was definitely twitching now, and the adjacent corner of his lip jumped on the twitching bandwagon along with it, hand in hand with his eyebrow. Sam wondered idly if the man were about to have a seizure. It had to be a blow to the ego for him to hear his mother deigning to forgive him for an action he had neither apologized for nor (to Sam's mind) regretted. (--_so many regrets, so many things left undone, so many things left unsaid_--_ no more time_--).

"Thank you for the sentiment," he spat from between gritted teeth, grin still held in place with ferrocious determination. "But if you'll excuse me, I think I'll be going now--"

Eyes still focused on his mother, Simmons turned to leave-- and collided with a 6 foot 2 marine, slopping orange juice, eggs and syrup all down the other man's front.

Perfect, absolute silence reigned in the mess hall as globs of food dripped slowly down the marine's gray t-shirt. Swallowing, Simmons took a prudent step back, then another, holding his tray before him like a shield.

"Wow. That's, uh, really nasty looking, all those condiments smeared together like that.....I really, really, did not mean to do that."

Slowly, the marine lowered his head and looked at the technicolor stickiness bathing his muscular chest. Ever cautious, the ex-agent shuffled back another few feet, putting Sam's table in between them.

"You know what?" He dropped his tray on the table with a clatter and stuffed a hand down his pocket, fishing. "I have a few ones right here you can use to get that dry-cleaned--"

With a zen-like measure of contemplation, the marine scraped a hunk of eggs from his shirt and held it in his hand. No one moved. No one breathed. For a moment Sam felt almost giddy, realizing that Simmons had managed to spill his food all over the biggest, meanest looking guy in the room. This would be interesting to watch.

Then, in a motion too swift to be seen, the marine drew back his hand and hurled the icky mound at Simmons. His mother, only just catching on to the fact that something was happening, sat up straighter in her chair and turned her head-- right into the path of the oncoming projectile. The oozing glob smacked her full in the face, splattering ketchup into her hair.

At the sight of his wife spitting out bits of egg, his father thrust back his own chair and stood up.

"Hey! Watch where you're throwing that-- you hit my Judy!"

And to Sam's astonishment, he lobed a pastry from his own tray at the bulky marine. With reflexes honed in combat his target ducked to the side, allowing the tumbling cinnamon roll to splat against the side of another soldier's face.

Once more a dead silence took hold. But then the newly sticky soldier stood up, violently pushing his tray over the table into someone else's lap, and with a thunderous roar of noise the entire room erupted into hollering chaos.

"FOOOOD FIGHT!"

Sam pulled Mikaela under the table just as the epic battle commenced, and soon the air was thick with flying breakfast foods. Lazer bolts of streaming ketchup and squirted syrup arched overhead, interspersed with mini flak clouds of exploding egg, sausage bullets, and cinnamon roll bombs. Puddles of liquid splashed across the floor-- orange, pink, yellow, steaming brown-- turning the battle field into a sugar and caffine bath. Scrambling to avoid being mowed down in the onslaught, Simmons tried to drop to his hands and knees to crawl under the table with them. But a soldier, embroiled in the epic mess-hall siege, latched onto his foot and dragged him back out into the open to be thoroughly drenched in perishables. Sam laughed uncontrollably, face hurting from his wide, amazed grin, knowing that Simmons wouldn't last a minute.

Mikaela grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him in for an awkward kiss around the legs of the table. Pulling back far too quickly for his liking, she leaned her forehead against his.

"We don't have much time left, Sam," she intoned dramatically, though he sensed the double meaning to her words, "So lets go out with a bang!"

He leaned in for another kiss. "Ladies first."

And Mikaela put her hand over his face and thrust him out into the fray, laughing even as she tossed him to the storming pack of wildly entertained soldiers (wolves).

A hand grabbed the front of his shirt as his torso slipped out from under the table, yanking him to his feet. Leo. His ex-room mate was hardly recognizable; something sticky and dripping slowly down his nose plastered the chia pet mop of hair to his head, and his arms and face now sported ketchup war paint.

"We got a war to win, soldier!" He shouted at Sam, pushing him forward into the crush of writhing, shouting, laughing bodies. And despite the fact that he was swiftly covered by all manner of things he would rather not name, Sam found himself laughing as well. He snatched up an untouched bowl of hash browns from another table and dumped it over his father's head, screeching in protest as he recieved a thick squirt of ketchup in retaliation. He reached for the strong, calloused hand (--_a gentle hand tucking him into bed and smoothing his hair-- fisting into his shirt on the desert floor, not letting go-- 'I'm not leaving you! I'm not leaving you!'--) _and squeezed-- _goodbye, dad_-- reaching around with his other hand to stuff a pasty down the neck of his father's shirt, his father grabbing him in a head lock to do the same to him.

His mother, despite her earlier shock, had recovered in time to comandeer the entire McDonand's sized syrup dispenser and was liberally spraying anyone who came near, shrieking like a banshee, laughing through her protests of what a mess they were making of the place.

He dodged a reflexive stream she shot in his direction, catching her up in a hug and lifting her up off her feet. She was light, so light that he easily twirled her through the air a few times before she squirted syrup down the front of his shirt to make him put her down. And then he hugged her in earnest, basking in the familiar smell of her hair even through the choking grease of potatoes, sausage and bacon. Strawberries, that was it. Strawberries to match her redish hair (--_arms lifting him, resting him against a warm shoulder, nose burried in her hair while he cried from a skinned knee-- strawberries hidden beneath sweat, red covered by egyptian dust, arms holding him once more-- 'I almost lost you, I almost lost my son_...'--). He swept her off her feet and whirled her around again, bridal style, through the raining hail of food, through the falling shards of memory, and kissed her on the cheek--_ I love you too, mom_.

Then, determined to enjoy the one last spontaneous outbreak of random madness he would ever enjoy with his family, ever be able to savor without fearing for their lives and his, he leapt back into battle, searching out Mikaela. He owed her for betraying him and shoving him from their table-shaped bolt hole. But this time, it would not be to say goodbye. Maybe see you later, but not goodbye. Because no matter what he had to do, no matter how long he had to search, he would find a way back to her.

For now, he was content to spend another few minutes basking in laughter and joy and love (with a side of flying sausage biscuit).

It would have to be enough.

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At last the announcement came over the ship-wide intercomm that they were within 15 miles of the harbor, instructing various work crews to begin preparing the ship and the flight deck for the arrival of the launch boat that would ferry them to shore.

After the epic food fight had finally wound down (and after a few flustered officers had burst onto the scene and shouted the soldiers in the room to attention), Sam had briefly parted from his family to go grab a shower and a change of clothes, dumping his food-covered ones in the trashcan rather than waste time trying to find a washing machine. Then, showered and dressed, he had stood surveying his room, wondering if he should pack, before remembering that he didn't have anything to pack in the first place, save for what he already carried on his body. So he had simply flicked off the lights and left the room, planning to never again return.

His parents and Mikaela met him in the lounge. Though they all lumped up together on the sofa, no one moved to switch on the TV. Instead, they talked-- everything from sports to music, cars to tree species came up as topics, though no one mentioned politics, robots, aliens, or life in general. At some point Leo wandered in, coming to say goodbye to Sam with a manly handshake and replying to his raised eyebrow that Mikaela had filled him in on what was going on. For once, he didn't have anything clever or provocative to say.

Almost two hours slipped by without a whisper to mark their passing, two hours that came and went in two minutes, leaving him staring into Mikaela's eyes as the nasily death knell squawked over the intercomm. Thirty minutes until boarding.

As soon as the last repetition of the message died away, their phones all began to ring at once. Each one bore the same, impersonal text message to pack up their things and be on the flight deck, ready to leave, in twenty minutes. Sam turned off his phone and threw it over the back of the sofa, declaring that the launch boat wouldn't be ready to leave for thirty minutes and he therefore planned to remain right where he was for thirty minutes. No one raised a protest.

Even more quickly than the previous two hours had fled, all too soon thirty minutes were swept away in the onward-- and ever accelerating-- march of time. His parents left to make the journey to the flight deck, leaving Sam and Mikaela alone for two minutes of overtime. They made good use of it, engaging in the most intense two-minute make out session Sam had ever experienced. But then Mikaela's phone began to ring again, and after Sam reluctantly grabbed his blackberry they left the lounge hand and hand.

Half way to the flight deck Mikaela stopped suddenly, paling. Sam pulled up beside her, alarmed when she tugged her hand from his and turned back the way they came.

"Mikaela? What's going on?"

"I left something in my room, Sam," she called back to him, already hurrying away down the corridor, "Don't worry-- I'll meet you up on deck."

Once she vanished out of sight he swore violently, cursing whatever article of clothing or whatnot had been stupid enough to leave itself in her room and therefore deprive him of a few more minutes of her company. Reluctantly, he turned back and began trudging towards the deck again, much more slowly this time.

Alone with his thoughts (never a good thing), the fluttering panic once more beat its leathery wings against the cage of his chest. He was out of time and out of ideas. Once Mikaela had boarded her flight back to the US she was out of reach. He needed to think of _something_, only his brain refused to cooperate and grind through much thinking at all. Instead of worrying about the future, his parents, or Mikaela, he found his mind slipping back to the incident that morning in the infirmary and the disturbing presence of alien runes on the x-ray of his arm.

He focused on the limb swaddled in plaster and held to his side by a sling, judging the sensations it gave off. First: ow. Next: still ow, but not as powerful as it should have been. To his relief, he couldn't detect any trace of the tingling, crawling, drifting sensation that had accompanied his brief contact with the allspark shard and the subsequent 'episodes' that overcame him. But the fact that the feeling wasn't there _yet_ did little to assuage his fear-- if he were having a relapse, it might creep over him when he least expected it.

Though he groaned at the thought of seeking out Rachet and asking the robot to scan him (who knew what humilitating things the robot would spout....or what disasterous things....), he grudgingly admitted that it would be better to find out now if his mind still harbored remnants of the Allspark than stress over it for days and still find out later. So stealing himself for the inevitable, good or bad, he detoured to the right and jogged away from the deck, towards the cargo bay. If by any chance Rachet had not yet made it topside, he didn't want to go all the way to the deck only to discover that he needed to come back down again.

Drawling, boisterous shouts drifted down the hallway from the cargo bay, but pushing open the door he found only Mudflap and Skids within. Naturally the object of his search couldn't have the decency to appear when needed.

_"Moron! That chain goes over here!"_

_"Youse just being bossy. It's fine da way it is."_

The two Autobots scampered and cavorted around a large, open-sided trailer, shoving and kicking each other out of the way as each attempted to chain down a tarp-covered pile of scrap metal. Approaching slowly so as not to be caught up in the scuffle, Sam swallowed the urge to retch at the sight of the designation SR-71 stamped in flaking white on one of the black metal plates. Jetfire. Or what was left of him.

His skin crawled as he realized he stood looking at a piecemeal corpse, and he forcefully shook all thoughts of dismembered human bodies from his head (--_so much blood, bones snapping like twigs_--). It wasn't the same. The hunks of metal before him were not rotting, oozing flesh. But no matter how many times he chanted to himself that Jetfire was long dead, he could not entirely rid himself from the fear that the moment their backs were turned the pile would begin to shift and rise up, zombie-like, gurgling out incomprehensible demands for his stolen heart.

Slamming a mental door on the horror-filled image, Sam turned to go-- and stopped, the outline of a plan forming in his mind. He knew from experience that each of the Autobots possesed the ability to conduct even the most basic medical scans. While the Twin's probably could not monitor the flow of blood through his heart as Rachet could, they should at least be able to pick up on any Allspark radiation lingering around him. After all, Sector 7 had had to build the Hover dam on top of the thing just to keep any passing aliens from sensing it. And a definite plus to using the Twins instead of Rachet was that they probably had enough warped human decorum not to go blurting out random (and embarassing) tidbits of data. He hoped.

Slowly pivoting on his heel, he cleared his throat to announce his presence and waited until the two Autobots paused in their struggles and turned their gleaming blue optics in his direction. Why they felt the need to pretend not to realize he was there until he gave a signal was beyond him.

"Hey guys! I could use your help!"

Eager for any reason not to work, the twins immediately abandoned their mangled pursuit and trotted over to him.

"Oh _now_ he wants our help," Mudflap sneered, though his loping gait did not slow.

"You got us in trouble, man! Why should we do _anythin_ for you?" Skids tossed in, gathering close to his twin in Sam's personal space bubble. Aliens of any shape or description, even when acting as self-styled urban dwellers, seemed to have no concept that crowding over the invisible three-foot line made humans uncomfortable.

At any other time, Sam would have found the twin's grasp of Earthen idioms and laid back personalities to be refreshing, and would have happily engaged in a round of banter. But at the moment, too disturbed by the sight of Jetfire's parts being haphazardly loaded onto a trailer-- too preoccupied with fretting over the possibility of once more being taken over by the Allspark-- he refused to play along.

He passed a shaking hand over his eyes and took a step away from the technicolor robots, giving himself some breathing-- and thinking-- room. "One, because it gives you an excuse not to work for a few minutes. And two, I _know_ you're curious about what I want. So go on-- ask."

Picking up on his nail-spitting mood, they leaned away and traded glances over his head. But rather than walk away and leave him to stew in his own funk (and laugh as he jumped up and down in frustration), they turned back to him, suddenly serious, and crouched closer.

"Whatchu want?" Mudflap whispered secretively. And snickered. Okay, so maybe not so serious.

Sam glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one would walk into the room just as he began speaking, then replied, "I need to you scan me."

Mudflap pulled back slightly in confusion, optics spiralling closed, and flicked his gaze once more to his brother.

"Scan you? What fo?"

"I need to know if I have any radiation from the Allspark shard lingering around me. Until I saw you guys I was going to ask Rachet, but...he's not very discreet," Sam gave a helpless little shrug.

Skids shuffled closer, the rings around his optics whirling in preparation.

"We gotcha covered, dude. Anythin to get old Hachet," the green Autobot promised with all the solemnity of a prankster, initiating the scan.

As with Bumblebee and Optimus, Sam felt nothing as the alien receptors broadcast data collecting waves deep into his body. The only indication he had that Skids was doing something other trying to stare a hole in him to freak him out was the brief hiccup in the sound of his internal workings-- the high pitched, though normally unnoticed, drone of processors and servos paused, dropping momentarily to a thrumming bass, then ascended back up the scale and resumed its normal tone. Skids pulled away from him, the motion stiff with shock, and Sam felt his muscles seize in response. Not good.

"Holy Primus!" Skids whispered in fearful awe, "You got Allspark energy practically _drippin_ off ya, man! It's everywhere!"

Mudflap leaned in closer as though to take a look for himself, then like his brother he too jerked sharply away from the human. "Man, youse just covered up with it! How'd ya get like that?"

All the air vanished from Sam's lungs. He couldn't breathe.

His darkest fears had been true the whole time. Some wonder drug didn't cause his bones to knit-- the allspark did. Symbols didn't appear on the x-ray because of the close proximity of the Autobots-- they appeared because he _himself _served as a cesspool of alien radiation. Allspark radiation. It was happening again.

Breath flooded into his chest with a gasp, and he started to hyperventilate. Even though he knew asking again could do nothing to change the answer, he still found himself rasping, "R-really?"

Neither of the Autobots answered, only exchanging another set of pointed glances, and his stomach plummeted even further, wondering if the situation could possibly get even worse. He didn't see how it could, but then again things always seemed to go from bad to worse when aliens were involved, the bursting-from-people's-chests kind or otherwise.

But then the thrumming tension in the room, pulling tighter and tighter like a rubber band, suddenly snapped-- the twins sputtered, masks of seriousness slipping, and broke out into peals of mechanized laughter. Sam could only stare.

"Nah! Just messin witcha!" Mudflap informed the slack-jawed human, bumping fists with his twin.

Skids pointed to his own head with a large finger. "You shoulda seen yo face! Best Polaroid moment_ eva_!"

Stomach still hanging somewhere beneath his feet, for a moment Sam could only glance mutely between them. But then, as his mind slowly churned through the revelation that they had made a joke at his expense, his panicked gaze darkened into a glower. The howling only ascended in volume-- Skids launched himself into a backwards roll, skipping happily away from the human, as Mudflap spun in place with his legs pulled to his chest like a little kid. If not for the fact that he was being laughed at, the spectacle of watching immortal alien killing machines falling over themselves with simulated giggles would have been either wildly amusing or vaguely distrubing. As it was, Sam settled for upping the wattage of his glare a notch.

"Yeah, great," he muttered, "Thanks guys."

"Ooo, wait!" Mudflap called, suddenly sitting up and reining in his hilarity. "Ya may not be slathered up wit Allspark, but you got these little threads of somethin driftin around in there."

Sam replied with a dignified display of his middle finger, showing just how little he was impressed with the second attempt to scare him shitless. That would be the last time he asked for their help with anything remotely important. He turned to leave, but Mudflap reached out, catching him by the sleeve.

"Fo real this time, Sam-mah-man. You oughta get old Hachet to take a look at ya--"

"Which he did, just last night," Bumblebee interrupted, appearing behind Sam and latching onto Mudflap's hand, somehow causing the red Autobot to yelp in pain and snatch his arm back.

"OUCH! What's yo problem, Stumblebee?!"

As soon as Mudflap withdrew his arm the yellow scout stepped away, drawing close to Sam. A flicker of motion rippled a lower portion of his forearm armor. Sam narrowed his eyes at the spot, though whatever had been there folded itself out of sight again before he could make out what it was. But for a sliver of an instant, he thought he had seen a dagger-like blade extending from the inside of Bee's wrist. Though of course that was stupid, because Sam knew the yellow scout didn't have any knives. Or at least if he did, Sam had never seen them (--_bumblebees can't sting_--).

"Don't touch m-- don't touch him," the scout said softly, blue optics blazing impossibly bright.

_That_ caught Sam's attention. When speaking with his own voice rather than through radio snippets, Bumblebee mantained virtually flawless grammer and, unlike the twins, never stuttered. As far as he knew, unless they did it on purpose, the robotic visitors_ couldn't _stutter. Something must have really upset him to cause his thought relays to skip that noticably.

"Fine, fine. Chill, dude. Seriously," Mudflap soothed, holding up his hands (--one finger sporting a tiny slit--) in a placating gesture, "I was jus tryin to help!"

Bumblebee's hand twitched towards Sam, but he curled it back away from the human before it could brush his skin.

_::'I don't need no body--!'::_

"Bee?" Sam questioned in bewilderment. The yellow robot shut down his radio.

"As I have said," Bumblebee informed Mudflap and a watching Skids, seemingly ignoring Sam, "Rachet examined him last night. Your concern is misplaced."

Mudflap scuttled crab-like a few paces away from the larger Autobot. "Geez! You got some bolts screwed in too tight, Stumblebee!"

Visibly relaxing at Mudflap's retreat, Bumblebee stepped away from Sam and lunged forward to his hands and knees, transforming as he went. By the time he touched the floor he was no longer a robot, but a sleek, powerful Camaro. He revved his engine.

A reel of metallic warbles and clicks from the newly disguised robot sent both of the twins scrambling back to Jetfire's remains.

"We're going! Don't get yo drive train ina twist!" they shouted back.

Sam stared after them in amazement. Mudflap and Skids normally ignored or laughed at anyone besides Optimus or Ironhide-- and even Ironhide sometimes became the target of a defiant raspberry. He wondered what Bee had said in Cybertronian that made them start falling over themselves to get back to work.

The Camaro turned with a crunching of wheels on concrete, inching towards him hesitantly with the same tightly-leashed intensity he had sensed the night before. Like a cross between a puppy desperate for affection and... something he could not identify, something so powerfully breathtaking (--twin flares of blue light, bright as angel dust, compelling as a demon's snare--) that it could not be named. Yet once more the sense of the incanny evaporated in an instant, leaving nothing but a cheerful yellow camaro that seemed anything but cheerful as it reluctantly slid into reverse and backed away again. It turned, angling for the recessed chambers formed by the maze of crates, and pulled up alongside him. Electric tension sizzled and throbbed across the empty air between them, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Now he _knew_ he was going insane. There was no reason for him to feel pulled to the camaro like a sock obeying the call of static cling. No reason, because the feeling wasn't real. It was a phantom sensation from his messed up mind. Nothing more.

All too soon the invisible tugging faded as well, leaving him stupidly leaning towards the Camaro, feeling light-headed and high. He shook his head and leaned away again, taking a step back. And he did _not _hear a faint, subsonic whimper in response. He did not. Even if the sound of it was so lonely it made him want to wrap his arms around himself.

"Sam," his guardian called his name, breaking him free of his stupor. Sam tried to smile in response, feeling completely mental. God, it was a _car_. Get a grip, Sam.

"Yeah?"

The engine rumbled, a restrained growl. "You were supposed to be up on deck nearly seven minutes ago. I suggest you leave."

Without waiting for a response, the camaro dropped into gear and rolled away, turning out of view behind a stack of crates. Light flashed from the window, and it was gone.

And Sam was left staring after it, feeling that he had just been given the cold shoulder by a _robot_. He swallowed thickly for a minute, reminding himself that the scout was probably busy helping to load things onto the launch boat and his tone had probably come out sharper than he meant it. But that didn't stop little painful barbs from lodging themselves in his heart at the memory of the flat, icy words (--'_I suggest you leave'_--). As an alien, he couldn't be expected to always appreciate how the inflection of his voice would be interpretted. It was silly for him to feel offended. And rejected. Of course it was (--only human, only-- '..._someone to live for_...'-- friendship from need, not love-- only human-- what can a human offer a god?--).

Almost three minutes passed before he could remember how to walk. And even then he still couldn't remember how to breathe.

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The first thing he noticed emerging into the bright Indian glare was the heat. It was _hot_. Not just ordinary August heat, the kind that made dogs slither into porch shadows to pant and sucked up energy to power air-conditionings. This was the kind of heat that flattened everything in its path more efficiently than a steam roller, wilting trees and turning sidewalks into griddles.

Immediately drenched with sweat the moment he set foot on deck, Sam shaded his eyes with a hand and squinted at the white hot sky. Living _here_ would probably do the Decepticon's work for them-- he already felt close to keeling over, and it had only been less than five minutes.

The launch boat coming to pick them up was late. It figured. Soldiers stood milling about in the shadows of the parked jets, talking and taking long swigs from water bottles. Seemingly obliviously to the heat (and to the blinding glares thrown from every curve of their bodies) Rachet and Ironhide sat side by side in full view of the sun, as silent as normal vehicles. He suspected they were communicating through an internal radio or something.

Turning a full rotation, he finally spotted his mother and Mikaela sitting in the shade a little distance away from the soldiers. His father was not with them. They waved, and he made a series of elaborate gestures seen previously only in asylums to inquire as to the whereabouts of their missing member. His mother eventually jabbed a finger in the direction of the observation tower.

As it was a few hours past noon, the tower cast a deep shadow over the deck immediately to one side of it, the very side the farthest distance away from the assembled Autobots and humans. His heart lurched painfully, wondering why his father had ventured so far away to find shade.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, he meandered in that direction, hoping he wouldn't have to talk his father back from the edge or something. But as he slowly rounded the corner, a flash of red and blue stilled him in his tracks. Holding his breath, he carefully retreated back out of sight, waited a beat, and peered back around the edge when no one shouted at him to go away.

There was his father, just as his mother had said (well, pointed). And across from him, legs folded in front of his massive body in a relaxed posture, sat Optimus Prime. His armor didn't gleam as it normally would even enshrouded in shadow-- now, in the daylight, he could see the uncounted number of scratches and abrasions that had not been visible the night before. Large patches of red and blue had worn away, though not in a manner that suggested flaking paint. He doubted they used paint to begin with, especially since he had observed them changing color at will. No, the missing color could be better compared to missing _skin_ that had been rubbed or torn away. The very thought had him swallowing bile.

At first it seemed that Optimus was still trying to convince his father that never seeing his son again was really for the best, but observing his father pointing a finger at the alien leader (who towered over him even when sitting, optics mutted to a soft glow), his stance wide and assertive, Sam was forced to reconsider. Especially when he realized that it was his father, not Optimus, doing the lecturing.

_"--I have something I need to say, and you're going to sit there and listen even if I have to hold you down myself. Diplomacy can go hang_."

Optimus merely inclinded his head, optics dimming even further, though the idea of his human father being able to keep the alien from doing anything was laughable. Apparently, Optimus planned to listen.

His father sucked in a few deep breaths through his nose to settle himself, then began again in a much leveler voice.

_"You may think I'm trying to make you change you mind, but I'm not. --As if it would do any good, you already have me in checkmate as it is." _He threw up his hands angrily, twisting to pace a few steps to the side, then returning to stand before Optimus. Breathing deeply again.

_"Anyway, that's not what I want. As much as I hate it, I'm not so stupid as to think I could protect him from those monsters on my own,"_ he tossed a disdainful hand at the silent robot, _"_You _certainly would be much better at it. Hell, with you guys he at least has a chance of surviving to see his next birthday!"_

Here Optimus leaned forward with a quiet intentness.

_"I swear to you, if it is within my power to grant it, your son will live to see many more decades yet."_

But his father merely flapped a hand as though swatting away a fly.

_"Yeah, yeah. You said that. That thrice-bound oath thing and all. But what if you decide you don't want to play by those rules anymore?"_

Optimus stiffened away from the human, and Sam held his breath in fluttering anticipation. He, too, had wondered the same thing. And he also wondered if what the alien told his father would be different from what he had told Sam himself.

_"There is no tangible proof I can give you to assure you of my word," _Optimus began slowly, "_But many who know me can attest to the fact that I will and _have _moved planets to keep it. --And I speak only partially in metaphor," _his tone turned wry, and Sam wondered if only he could hear the dry humor in robot's next words. _"If you wish, I can provide a list of character references for you pursuance."_

His father waved away the offer, pacing back and forth again with his hands on his hips, staring at the metal decking. He stopped, opened his mouth to speak. Closed it again and rubbed a hand over his face, the back of his neck.

_"Look," _he said at last, _"I may not have much of a choice here, but let's get one thing straight. My son is something special. Real special. I may not have told him much, and maybe I should have, but he is. So you better take real good care of him. I don't just mean keep him from getting squashed-- that's just surviving. I want my son to _live_."_

He turned to look Optimus squarely in the face, brown organic eyes meeting shimmering blue optics, and stepped closer, pointing his finger at the metal chest before him.

_"I'm giving up my son-- my _son--_ to save his life. I may hate it, I may want to kick and scream and tell you to jump off a cliff, but I can't, so I'll only say this: I can't be a father to my son anymore, so you had better be like a father to him in my place!"_

He paused. Though Sam couldn't see his face, the sound he made drawing in a breath almost verged on open weeping.

_"So you'd better be the best damn father in the whole _universe_ for the best son in the whole universe. You'd better threaten his girlfriends and listen to him rambling even when you have no idea what he's talking about, a-and give him Christmas presents he thinks he's too old for but really wants anyway. You'd better hug him when he doesn't want you to but really needs you to. You'd better give him a good kick in the ass when he does something stupid, and tell him you're proud of him when he does something great. You'd better protect him from the scary things that live in closets and under beds as well as those things made of metal and wielding guns. You'd better love him even when you want to hate him, and make sure he knows it even when he hates you."_

He broke off, voice wobbling dangerously, and he sucked in another trembling breath. Optimus didn't speak, gaze unwavering, though it seemed to Sam that his optics blazed just a little brighter. Sam lifted his shoulder to rub his face against his shirt. It was only sweat. He wasn't crying. He wasn't. (--_daddy!_--)

_"I don't care who you are," _his father began again, tone hard as granite even though his voice emerged raw, _"I don't care how old you are, how smart you are, how big you are, how strong you are, if you're a leader or a grunt, or even if you're an alien or not-- you better do right by my son."_ Here his voice broke entirely, cut through with tightly restrained sobs,_ "You better do right by my son-- because he's yours now, and good fathers take care of their sons."_

Optimus sat in silence for a long moment, optics humming with a gentle blue light. When at last he spoke, the words came slowly, washing over Sam like a vow. And he _knew_-- knew in that primal way that could be neither explained nor denied-- that it was a vow that would not be broken.

_"I have already failed one son. I will not fail another."_

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When the launch boat finally arrived, the lazy barbeque picnic air erupted into a flurry of frenzied activity. The two boats were secured together by a series of thick chains, and a movable staircase on wheels was rolled into position to create a pathway to the much shorter boat dipping and rolling in the carrier's shallows. The two Autobots accompanying the humans on the first trip to shore-- Ironhide and Rachet-- jumped lithely over the side to the deck below, forgoing the use of stairs. When the chains were unwound and the launch boat prepared to make the journey back to shore, Sam jumped on of the deck hands in a panic, telling them that they needed to wait for the others-- to which he was told that the total weight of all the Autobots plus Jetfire's remains was far too heavy to carry in one trip. After that he went to sit with his parents and Mikaela, feeling stupid.

Trying to brace his family (and himself) for the coming separation, he refused to hold their hands or throw his arms around them like he was tempted to do. Not only were Lennox and Epps there to serve as witness, he didn't want Rachet and Ironhide thinking him weak. No matter what Optimus had promised his father, he knew he wasn't one of them and never would be. He was a preiphery concern, no more. And if he wanted to keep from becoming a nuisance, he knew he needed to be able to take care of himself.

He also knew that if he allowed himself to hold them now he would never be able to let go.

They passed the three miles to shore in silence. Well, at least their little insultated group did. The soldiers talked and laughed freely, obviously excited to get back to base. Watching them, Sam felt green and choked back an urge to vomit that had nothing to do with sea sickness. He couldn't look at his parents. Or Mikaela. So he traced the lines of Ironhide's chrome regardless of the glare and told himself that he was not going to cry.

The same distant haze that overcame him before school plays and while totting Allsparks descended as the boat pulled into port. He moved as if in a fog-- looking but not seeing, moving where directed like a mindless sheep. Time had accelerated again, and now he could only see what was happening through split-second freeze frames.

Gangplank pulled into place, stepping onto solid ground. An unfamiliar hand on his shoulder, steering him through the bustling port. A glimpse of suited agents forming a ring around them, herding them together, keeping all others at bay. A line of black SUVs, like the ones that had taken him from his house over a year ago (had it only been a year?). A glimpse of Mikaela's face, of Mikaela's eyes and something like love in their depths, and then they were loaded into different SUVs-- he in one, his parents and Mikaela in another. The door sealed him inside with a muffled thump of air, like sealing him into a refridgerator, the air conditioning going full blast. Better than the Indian heat, but at the moment, through the fog, he couldn't seem to care either way.

Shift into drive, pull away. Watch the other black boat go a different direction. They were already gone, and he hadn't even noticed the parting. He thought it should have been more dramatic-- with lightning, volcanoes, and violin interludes. Nope, none of that. Just pile into different SUVs and drive away.

Another blink, and the agents with him were pulling him back out into the heat, hustling him across a vast expanse of asphalt that he dimly recognized as a runway. A cargo plane-- a C-17, he dredged up from his memory-- waited with its mouth open to swallow the Autobots whole. But they guided him away from the C-17 and to another, much smaller plane and up another set of stairs.

Blink again, and he was sitting in a seat with the seat belt on, across the isle and back a few rows from Galloway, who was reading a newspaper. Though the plane could have held almost ten, there were only three of them occupying the passenger compartment-- one stuffy politician with his head stuck up his own butt, one suited agent who gave him a kind smile, and one 18-year-old world-saving wonder who had suddenly lost his powers.

At last time began to slow again, fog clearing from his mind. But once it had gone he wished it would come back-- everything was too sharp, too painful, like shards of broken glass. He leaned forward, elbows to knees, and buried his face in his palms, not carrying if anyone saw him cry. But he didn't cry. His eyes only felt dry and tired, as though he needed to collapse in bed and hibernate for a few months.

When he looked up again, the unfamiliar agent smiled and motioned for Sam to join him in the chair facing him across a small plastic table. The benefit of a private aircraft, he mused as he stood and crossed the isle, was that the small number of people allowed for an unorthodox arrangement of seats.

The man stood up at his approach, holding out a strong hand.

"Hi, Sam," he said with a smile, "I'm Dave. Nice to meet you."

After looking at the outstretched limb for a moment before remembering what to do, he shook hands with the agent and tried to smile in return. He like the man already-- first he called him 'Sam', not 'Samuel', and second he'd introduced himself by his first name. The only adults he'd ever seen do that were really cool teachers and shrinks. Since this guy was waay too muscular to be a shrink (and he packed a gun), he assumed it was the former.

After trading grips, Dave sank back down into his chair, motioning for Sam to do the same.

"You're probably wondering who I am besides 'Dave', so I might as well tell you that I'm your case worker, so to speak." Sam opened his mouth, and the gun-carrying agent lifted a finger to forestall him. "And no, not the kind of case worker that oversees foster children. Yes, I do know about the Autobots. And no, I am not here to shoot, harass, torture or otherwise embarass you or your friends. I'm more like your official link to the outside world, and you should probably know that I have both the secretary of state and Optimus Prime on speed-dial."

Sam could only lean back in his seat in amazement.

"Woah...are you, like, _psychic_ or something? Because you just answered every question I had and every question I could think of without me having to say _anything_. Just, wow."

Dave smiled modestly. "They don't pay me the big bucks for nothing."

"Wait," Sam sat up straighter in his chair, "You have Optimus on _speed dial_?! I didn't even know he had a phone!"

"He doesn't have a phone, but he does have an arrangement where I can dial in a telephone number from anywhere in the world and he will pick up. --Or not, if he's in a pissy mood."

Sam's liking and respect grew by leaps and bounds. "I can understand the Secretary of State part, but why Optimus?"

"As an employer, he's very difficult to get into contact with any other way."

"....employer?"

He inclined his head, smiling slightly again. "Everyone agreed that there would probably have been a conflict of interests if, as your link to the human world, I worked for the United States."

"No, I get that part," Sam waved it away, "I mean, he can pay you?" And the corollary, "He has money?!"

"Of course. Did you think he goes all over the world hunting Decepticons with us for free?" he laughed.

Feeling suddenly mischevious, Sam leaned forward and whispered, "How much does he make?"

"Sorry, Sam. Confidentiality was part of my contract. If you want to know that, you'll have to ask him." He laughed again as Sam swore in frustration. "But in any case, perhaps it is time we move on to more serious topics."

Sam's momentarily light heart sunk like a stone, his mood sinking with. "Yeah," he shook himself, sitting up straight. It was time to be an adult now. Human 'link' or not, he knew he would need to be able to function on his own from that time forward. He couldn't expect to be able to go crying to the Autobots (or Bee) whenever something went wrong. They had imporant things to do. He was just baggage, though he was determined to be the most inobtrusive baggage possible. "Let's get started."

As it turned out, there was a lot more that he needed to know than he had been able to dream up in the day since he'd found out that he would be rooming with the Autobots. Permanently. Most were boring routine things like having finger and retinal scans taken and being issued a security clearance card and password, as well as rules and procedures he would need to abide by, the actual layout of the base (though Dave couldn't give him a paper map to help out with that one, in case it fell into the wrong hands).

When the issue of clothing and other personal items came up, he was dismayed to learn that they would not be able to bring him any of his things from home-- in fact, not even his parents would be going back to his house. Both they and Mikaela were going straight into the witness protection program and being moved to undisclosed locations. "Because the Decepticons know where your house is-- and probably hers too. If anyone attempted to go back there for your clothes or videogames, not only might they themselves be in danger, they might inadvertantly lead the Decepticons back to base. Sorry, Sam, but we can't risk that."

He was also shocked to learn that his father's demands had been near prophetic-- although he was no longer technically a minor, the ultimate authority over him went to Optimus, and while he was still in school (yes, he would be learning through a combination of online courses and tutors on base, and no, he could study whatever he wished, though politics was necessarily a requirement given his position) he would recieve an 'allowance' of sorts for personal spending and to buy him food and clothes and to pay for college. He almost collapsed into a fit of giggles at the mental image of Optimus cracking open his wallet and doling out money. It was either that or collapse in a seizure. Apparently, the alien leader was fairly rich.

The only answers Dave could not give him pertained to his future after getting a college degree. Sam had panicked, thinking that he would be forced to join the military, to which Dave had laughed. "You're no longer an American citizen, Sam. So even if they wanted to force you to join-- which they can't, given that there is no draft in place-- you wouldn't be joining the _American_ military in the first place. And I don't think the Autobots are looking for human recruits." But beyond that, no one seemed to have much of an idea of what to do with him after he had a diploma in his hot little hands. Sam felt even more useless than before, realizing he might actually be stuck around doing _nothing_ of any value.

All too soon the pilot announced that they would be landing in five minutes. Sam buckled his seat belt, watching Galloway fold up his newspaper and set it aside. The man had not said a single word to him the whole time, though he'd been present for the conversation. Not that Sam particularly wanted to chat with him, but still.

Suddenly snagging on an idea, Sam turned back to Dave, forcing down his eagerness in an attempt not to give too much away.

"Actually..." he drew the other man's attention away from the window, working to sound disinterested, "I was wondering what someone would have to do, hypothetically, to get someone else clearance to come to the base."

Dave raised an eyebrow. "Hypothetically."

Stupid, stupid, stupid! Sam could have kicked himself for being so obvious. He worked to smooth out his dismayed expression, giving a casual shrug. "Yeah, just wondering. Do you have any idea how someone would go about it?"

"Well," he tapped the tips of his fingers together pensively, "You have to keep in mind that I'm not in charge of security, and therefore I have no say over who gets to come on base. If...someone....were truly determined to bring someone else on base, it would be in that first someone's best interest to talk to Captain Lennox."

Lennox, of course! Sam repressed a groan of self-annoyance, wondering if he were that fatally stupid. If the truth had come along and smacked him in the face earlier, he could have saved himself all that time snooping around in a dusty office by simply talking to the military commander. Suddenly filled with a new sense of purpose, he refused to consider the possibility that Lennox might say no. Now that he had an angle of approach, it had to work. It just had to. He only had a little over a day left before Mikaela's plane left.

"I guess that would be the smart thing for that someone to do, then," he smiled back, in thanks. Though still pretending to be ignoring them as the plane came in for a landing, Galloway snorted. Dave rolled his eyes-- to Sam's intense amusement-- then held his gaze and gave him a deliberate wink.

The pilot came over the intercomm as they touched down. _"Welcome, gentlemen, to NEST base of operations."_

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

One constant he noticed between the port and the large island was the heat. Still there, still oppressive, soaking his shirt with sweat and showing no sign of letting up. He missed snow already.

One huge difference, however, was that most of the island was beautiful. Tropical paradise beautiful. The beauty extended just as far as the beginning of the overground base and stopped short, because the base itself (what he could see of it, since most nestled deep down into the bedrock beneath them) was as gray and dismal as asphalt, barbed wire, concrete and corrugated roofs could be. Despite his spectacular imaginings, it mostly resembled every other base he'd visited or seen in pictures-- a maze of warehouses and hangers edged in double rows of barbed wire and riddled with security cameras and motion sensors. All in all, not very high tech. And to his growing apprehension, not very fortified, either.

The two C-17s had already landed and were spewing out their cargo of Autobots and soldiers onto the runway. His heart unknotted slightly when Bumblebee backed out as well-- irrational though it was, he hadn't been able to help fearing that the yellow scout had somehow been left behind.

Several armed soliders came to flank them as they strode brisky towards one of the unmarked hangers. Sam leaned close to Dave, though he only came up to his shoulder, and whispered, "I thought this place was supposed to be ultra high-tech with enough security to stop a tidal wave? There are only two rows of barbed wire!"

"Here, on the surface, perhaps," he whispered in return, "But it wouldn't be very smart to go displaying all our anti-Decepticon technology for everyone to see, now would it? Any one who happens to look at us will only see another base, and not a very large one at that."

"And the best way to protect something is to hide it in plain sight," Sam mumbled to himself as they passed through a gate and were herded through a thick steel door set into one of the concrete slab hangers.

To his shock, the room beyond was empty.

"What?" he breathed in confusion, but Dave only took him by the arm and gently led him forward, stopping near where all the other soldiers and agents had gathered in one big clump.

One of the soldiers hefted his gun to his left shoulder to free his hand. He reached out--- _and tapped on the air_.

"A hologram," Dave whispered to him, "Courtesy of the Autobots."

The floor beneath them jerked, groaned, and suddenly they were descending _through_ the floor as though through quicksand. A hand hooked itself under his arm as he cried out in shock and tried to stumble to the side.

"Let me guess," he squeaked as the floor came up to his chest. It was more like passing through air than passing through concrete-- he felt nothing at all as it rose to swallow the buttons of his shirt in quick sucession. "Another hologram?"

"Yes. We're riding an elevator of sorts."

"Oh, great." The floor came up to his chin, his nose. "Fun times."

And then he was through it, looking back at a transparent image of the floor from below. It was like looking up at the surface from underwater, though _this_ barrier did not shimmer and dance with ripples and light.

But when he looked down, all thoughts of the perfect hologram were driven from his mind. He realized that making a patch of air resemble concrete was only a drop in the bucket compared with what the Autobots could do when they put their minds to it. He was distantly aware of his mouth dropping open and of a smattering of chuckles around him in response. But he couldn't tear either his mind or his eyes away from the sight of the vast, cavernous room before him as the elevator slowed its descent and clunked into place without jostling them in the least.

"Welcome to NEST, Sam," Dave said in his ear. Some part of his mind reminded him to pull his tongue back into his mouth before he tripped over it.

The main chamber the elevator dumped them into could have easily allowed a transformer twice Optimus' height to stretch its arms without grazing the ceiling. A series of metal grate stairs and catwalks formed platforms at different heights around the room, presumably to allow the two races to talk on equal footing. Every square inch of space-- and not just floor space-- had been crammed with technology he had never seen and could think of no name for, only some of which might have been computers. A cool blue glowed filled the room from the hundreds of screens and spiralling holographic displays. Countless humans, soldiers and civilians alike, scurried down the winding isles, giving reports, monitoring readouts, examining data, and occasionally bringing coffee. No one appeared to notice their entrance. No human, that is.

Perfectly at ease with the constant stream of creatures milling about their feet, two Autobots worked their way across the room toward their group. The electric blue robot in the front-- Jolt, he remembered-- waved in greeting and recieved a cluster of waves and shouts in return as the soldiers accompanying Sam and Dave began to disperse. An unfamiliar, and vaguely dangerous looking, silver robot trailed behind him. His emotionless visor turned in their direction, though he offered no wave.

"Hey, guys!" Jolt greeted easily, going down on one knee before them, "Optimus and the others got back just before you did, if you were wondering."

"And we should be with them _now_," The silver one interjected in a hard voice, somehow still appearing to be bored despite the ostentatious lack of a face.

Jolt turned and bleeped at him in a 'get lost' way, then turned back to the pair, focusing his intense gaze on Sam.

"So, _you're_ the one everyone's been gossiping about." He brought his head even closer to Sam's, pushing so far into his space bubble that Sam was convinced it would pop at any moment. He blinked, momentarily stunned and fascinated, to find that Jolt's optics didn't match. One glowed the classic Autobot blue, but the other one gleamed emerald green, sparking here and there with sudden arcs of electricity. Sam took a prudent step back, remembering the sheer amout of electric current Jolt had discharged in Egypt. The robot was a walking _battery_. "We've all been very anxious to meet you, Sam," he caught the way Sam slid his gaze to the silver Autobot and added, "Even Sideswipe. He just won't admit to admiring anyone other than himself."

Sideswipe stiffened, and at first Sam thought it was in indignation, but then the Autobot relaxed again and hissed out a few notes of static to Jolt. Jolt cycled air through his vents in a sigh.

"It seems we're being summoned by Optimus. Unfortunately, necessary things like introductions and tours will have to wait until we get this settled."

"Wait," Sam shook his head to clear the cobwebs from it, remembering back to almost three hours ago (--'_got a call from NEST'_--). "The thing he's calling you all for-- is that what you guys radioed us on the ship about? Is it some kind of emergency?"

Sideswipe spoke over anything Jolt might have said, replying, "It might very well end up one if we don't investigate it. Let's go, Jolt."

Jolt sighed again, rising to his feet. "Oh well. Duty calls. I'll see you later, Sam."

And to Sam's complete amazement and embarassment, Jolt ducked into a low, alien bow, Sideswipe mirroring the gesture beyond him. He had never, _ever _seen the Autobots bow. Maybe the new arrivals did to Optimus, but he'd never been around to see that before. He hoped it was only a Cybertronian custom for greeting new people.

As Jolt turned to go, Sam lunged after him, inspired by a sudden idea. Maybe he didn't have to be useless, after all. "Wait, hold up! I'm coming too!"

Sideswipe turned and snapped something brutal sounding at Jolt, but Jolt merely clicked back with equanimity and then went silent for a moment, optics briefly darkening. When he straightened, he turned to look down at Sam.

"Sideswipe may not like it, but since Prime gave the okay you can come along. Let's go!"

Without pausing to ask for premission, the blue Autobot leaned down and scooped him off his feet. Sam swallowed back a cry of alarm, reaching out to grip the blue wrist instead to steady himself. He doubted the Autobot would be clumsy enough to let him fall, but fifteen feet in the air he wasn't taking chances. Similar to how Mudflap and Skids and handled him but with a more notable degree of respect, Jolt settled him into the crook of his arm and trotted off after Sideswipe in the same rolling, dancing, crouching motion that took them within inches of shaving someone's head yet never even spilled a cup of coffee. Turning back to the swiftly disappearing Dave with a shrug, he marveled at the situational processing power of the aliens. Their reflexes must have been at least a hundred times that of a human.

NEST, he soon realized, was huge. The underground complex spiraled out in an endless series of tunnels, rooms, and larger chambers like the one through which they had entered, forming a buzzing warren of restless activity that seemed to extend out in every direction-- including down. On the short plane ride from the mainland, Dave had informed him that they were still digging, expanding-- buildings structures that would have been thought impossible without Autobot input. He wondered briefly just how deeply they had dug and if they had even gone beneath the ocean floor-- then, thinking of all the ramifications of having a virtual underground alien city (can you say 'cheesy sci fi horror flick'?), he decided that he really didn't want to know.

Jolt's space-devouring strides sent them hurtling down corridor after corridor faster than should have been possible, though the alien fluidity of his motion prevented Sam from being rattled in his perch like a jackhammer. Somehow, in less than thirty seconds, the Autobot had reached his destination, slowing to a stately walk as he entered another lofty chamber followed by a surly Sideswipe.

Compared with the new room Sam found himself in, the place where the elevator set them down had been no more than a lobby, about as high-tech and secretive as a coffee shop. Save for the catwalks that were also present in the room as in most other places around the base, the technology packed into every corner had a distinctly alien feel to it-- it seemed more organic than human made devices. A mosaic of different sized screens dominated one wall, the largest of the bunch measuring around twenty feet in length. At the moment they all showed the same image-- a desk-top background of soothing blue and green curves, overlaid with a few unlabeled icons. The word 'Microsoft' winked cheerfully up from the corner of every screen, directly below a black outline of the classically red Autobot symbol. Sam knew he had definitely entered bizarro land.

Though here too humans filled the room, they were for once out numbered by aliens. Arranged before the wall of screens stood the Autobots, all having converted back into bipedal mode for the meeting. Optimus stood towards the back of the group as the tallest. His head twisted in their direction as they entered, optics focusing briefly on Sam as he gave a feeble wave. As if the motion from their leader were a signal of some sort, several other armored heads turned to take in their arrival. One or two waved, though most did nothing but turn again to regard the waiting screens. Some didn't even acknowledge their presence. His heart contracted painfully as he realized that Bumblebee numbered among the group regarding them as part of the wallpaper.

Most of the gathered Autobots he recognized, though there were a few he had never seen before. Optimus, Rachet, Ironhide, Bumblebee, Mudflap, and Skids were givens. Arcee, he noticed with a shiver of knowing dread, was the only one from Egypt not among their number. He had lost track of the three combiners during the battle.

Also among them stood a bulky, dark green robot who gave Sam a friendly salute, to which the human offered a wane smile in return....were those leaves sticking out from the cracks between his armor?

Near the very front, a spindly white robot scarcely large than a human stood twittering nervously, its needle-like fingers clicking together in discordant harmony. Or at least, it appeared nervous on first glance. Looking closer, he realized the robot seemed to be absorbed in its own little world, muttering to itself and moving its forelimbs spasmodically the way some people would mime typing or playing the piano in their sleep. Note to self-- stay away from the creepy white dude.

"Jolt. Sideswipe...Sam," Optmus acknowledged. By unspoken command, Jolt gingerly lifted Sam from his arms and set him carfully on one of the catwalks beside a cluster of uniformed officers before moving to join the other Autobots. Sam furiously convinced himself that he had only imagined the feel of large fingers petting the back of his head just before the robot pulled away. There was no way he had just been scratched behind the ears like a dog. His liking for Jolt cooled considerably.

Optimus turned to face forward once more, looking down at the ant-sized human operating the console under the wall of screens.

"We're ready."

At once, the microsoft background vanished in a wash of light as another window popped up to take its place. A black-and-white image spread to fill the screen, showing-- of all things-- a grainy, distorted view of oncoming traffic, as seen from the point of view of a street light. Overlaid across the image blinked the word 'Pause', beneath which was printed a chronometer set at 05:42:13:57. 5 o'clock, and judging from the amount of cars lined up nose to tail, it was rush hour.

A woman standing near him on the catwalk-- to his surprise dressed in jeans and a paint-stained plaid shirt-- stepped forward and began to speak.

"What you see here is a recording caught by a traffic camera in Lagos, Nigeria. The dispatchers didn't know what to make of it at first, so it took a while before our software picked up on the alert. Right now, _we're_ not even sure what to make of it, so we hope you guys will have a better idea of what this thing is than we do at the moment. Jeff, start 'er up."

The steadily blinking 'Pause' vanished, though the video did not immediately leap into motion. A moment passed before the cars lurched and began to trickle forward. Just as suddenly they froze again, the video jerking to a stop, then began to move once more as though nothing had occured. Move, stop, move. Sam realized that the camera had recorded in stop motion, taking snapshots of the traffic at a set interval. At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary but gray splotches of cars inching their way forward, appearing at the top of the screen and vanishing as they made it to the bottom. But then a ripple of motion disturbed one of the cars at the very back of the pack, though he couldn't see quite what was happening due to other vehicles blocking the camera's line of sight. A beat up oldsmobile drove into view, going much faster than all the other cars around it, and changed lanes to pass in front of a Toyota-- _and vanished._ The Toyota fish-tailed to the side as though struck by some invisble force, dropping back out of view. A split second later, the _same_ Toyota appeared farther along in the stream of traffic, closer to the camera. It drifted back into the right lane from nothing but air, as though in switching lanes it had passed from one dimension into another. It weaved around a few more cars, vanished again, and a Lexus popped into existance farther down the road in front of a truck, immediately changing lanes once more. Just before it vanished off screen, Sam could have sworn he saw the Lexus _leap_ into the air over the car in front of it, but then the view was lost and the strobbing apparition departed as quickly as it had come, leaving behind nothing but an uninterrupted flow of ordinary cars drifting through the twilight gray.

"It's like a _mirage_," Sam gasped quietly in awe.

The clip stopped, rewound, and paused over an image of the toyota shimmering into existance. The trunk of the car simply _wasn't there_. Slowly the recording ground forward, and bit by bit the back end of the car extracted itself from the air. No ripple in the fabric of the universe, no strobbing lights. One minute it wasn't there, and the next it was. Though the fact that the original Toyota had been knocked out of the way by an invisible force suggested that _something_ had been there all along, even if they couldn't see it.

The woman turned to Optmus. "Well? What do you make of it?"

An outburst of several Autobots all speaking in Cybertronian at once echoed around the room. Sam had never seen them this agitated; they turned to one another, clicking, warbling, hissing, but no one seemed to have a definite answer. Even Optimus rumbled at Ironhide in a heated discussion. After almost two minutes of furious alien chatter, Optimus emitted a short blip of thrumming static that caused all noise to immediately cease. He turned back to the woman, switching to english.

"I'm afraid we don't have much of an answer for you. None of us has ever encountered an Autobot, or Decepticon, able to render themselves completely invisble and change their alternate form three times in a matter of seconds."

The spindy white robot spoke up, and to Sam's surprise his voice emerged a mellow tenor, far different from the squealing chatter the human had expected from his experience with Frenzy. "There were many experiments back on Cybertron with this kind of technology. I myself worked on several. But as far as I know, we were never able to develop, much less implement, any workable technology that would grant one of our race that level of stealth."

"Have there been any reports of destruction in or around Lagos?" Optimus asked.

But the woman only shook her head. "No. No explosions, no big fires, no reports of metal monsters roaming the streets. Heck, the usual number of murders even went _down_ rather than up."

"That does not rule out the possibility that it may be a Decepticon with common sense," Ironhide rumbled, cannons clicking and whirling.

"It could still be an Autobot, though perhaps one whose communication systems were damaged upon landing," the unfamiliar green alien put in.

"In any case," Optimus asserted when it looked as though the two heavily armored robots would begin to argue, "We need to send a team to investigate, whether to pick up a new ally or to dispatch a foe."

The white robot made a negative screeching noise, twisting to face Optimus. "You saw for yourself its capacity for stealth, Prime. Any team working in the area would almost certainly drive it into hiding, far beyond the reach of our scanners."

"Then what would you suggest?"

"A single individual would have a much greater chance of being able to take it by surprise. Sending a human would theoretcially be ideal-- a Decepticon, if that is truly what it is, would be unlikely to suspect a threat from a human."

This recommendation sparked another round of furtive alien arguments. The sound of the robotic language made Sam feel like his head had gotten stuck inside the modem box of a super computer. After only a few seconds the spatted bleeps of conversation died back down again and Optimus took up point.

"And if this 'mirage' _is_ a Decepticon, any human sent to track it would be in mortal danger, above and beyond the normal risks of being part of a team. Because this time, he or she would be alone," he turned away from the screens to face the group of assembled Autobots. "I will send one of my soldiers to Lagos, instead. Bumblebee?"

Sam's heart leapt into his throat as the yellow scout raised his optics without hesitation to meet his leader's gaze._ "'...lean on me...when you need me, I'll be there...'"_

"No, wait!" Sam cried in sudden panic, lunging forward to grasp the rail of the catwalk. "Why Bumblebee? Why does he need to be the one to go?"

He tried to catch his guardian's gaze, but the scout once more pretended not to notice his existence. Sam hoped it was from anxiety and not from a true desire to have the human drop off the face of the earth.

"You have seen for yourself Bumblebee's talents for tracking, Sam," Optimus replied, studying the image on screen rather than turning to face him, "He is also the only one of my soldiers with the requisite capacity for stealth to avoid being detected in his search for this 'mirage'. Anyone else would be sure to fail."

Sam gripped the railing until his knuckles turned white and the bones in his hands creaked. Images flooded through his mind at the thought of gentle Bee facing off against an invisible specter, showing him glimpse after nightmarish glimpse of the yellow scout falling under a hail of unseen blows, struggling to rise and being knocked down again, phantom blades slicing through his armor like the skin of a ripe tomato, ghostly claws peeling open his chest as he struggled against the air--

Optimus wanted to send him out alone to track down the unknown enemy. And Bumblebee had agreed to go. Objectively, theoretically, it made unquestionable sense-- a lone hunter, especially one as sneaky as Bee, would have a very good chance of being able to take the mirage by surprise. But the terrible thing with fangs that crouched in his chest roared NO! at the idea, screaming that that was his _friend_ Optimus was trying to send off into danger, and under no circumstances could he allow that to happen. Using logic wouldn't work-- he himself knew that logic was not in his corner this time. But how?

When the idea took shape in his mind he shuddered away from it, feeling sick with himself. But it was the only thing that had a chance of working. He had to go for the jugular.

He couldn't look at Optimus, not with the horrible, monsterous words forming in his mind and oozing like sludge into his mouth. He didn't want to say it. He almost would have preferred to cut out his own tongue first. But protecting Bumblebee was important enough that he was willing to ignore all Optimus had done for him, ignore the terrible lacerations covering his metal body and the stiffness of his movements, ignore the fact that the great leader had already laid down his life once for him. Maybe he was a monster. But then again, maybe only a monster had the power to save bumblebee.

"And you're _sure_ he'll be okay? He'll be safe?" Sam almost choked on his own words, so thick and vile were they as they rolled off his tongue. And still Optimus had no idea what waited to be said.

"Yes, Sam. Bumblebee knows what he's doing. He'll be safe."

(--_evil, evil monster!--stop!) _But he couldn't stop. He knew he was a monster, he knew he was lower than pond scum, but it had to be done.

His tongue unstuck itself from the roof of his mouth.

"Is that what you said last time?" he heard himself ask. "I would have thought three weeks would be long enough for you to learn otherwise."

He knew the silver bullet had hit its mark when Optimus jerked back as though struck. Sam couldn't meet his eyes. Instead he stared at the twisted red and blue armor, burning every unhealed battle wound into his mind and sobbing with shame on the inside. He wasn't pond scum-- he was one of the maggots that wriggled around in pond scum. But he wouldn't take back the spiteful words, not if they could keep Bumblebee from the mirage's clutches. Logic wouldn't work, but playing the alien's emotions like a fiddle might.

To his shock, it was Bumblebee himself who replied to his rhetorical questions. For the first time the scout turned to face the human, but the look in his optics had Sam cringing away. No longer did the blue glow see warm and friendly. Now, it cut him like ice.

"I am well equiped to handle a single transformer," Bumblebee said stiffly. "I do not need a human questioning my abilities."

Too late did Sam realize that his words betrayed not only Optimus' trust, but Bumblebee's as well. Too late his heart reminded him that it was not his secret to tell, not his memories to bring up in front of a room full of Autobots that would doubtlessly remember the scout's capture. He fully understood Bumblebee's anger, even expected it, but that didn't change how deepy the cold, cruel tone to the word 'human' cut into his soul. Bee had always called him Sam. Always. Only now, he didn't deserve it.

Without another word, the yellow scout turned to leave. Even feeling as fragile as blown glass, even burning with shame and regret, his heart still contracted with fear at the thought of his friend tracking down the unknown Decepticon all alone.

"Let me go with you!" Sam cried before he could stop himself, sprinting for the stairs leading down from the catwalk. "Please! I can help!"

Bumblebee stopped but didn't turn to face him.

His voice came back hollow, dead. (..oh bee...forgive me...). "No, you can't."

"You'll probably need someone to talk to the other humans-- you know, scope things out, see if anyone saw something--"

"What I need is for you to stay here."

He started down the steps, ignoring the warning in the scout's tone. "I can't do you any good here--"

"There is nothing _you_ could possibly do to help me."

Sam stumbled to a halt, iron bands tightening around his chest.

"But...me and you, we're a team! R-right? We have to stick together!" (please, no....)

Bee curled into himself a little, but the final blow came as flat and unhesitant as ever.

"I do not _want_ you to come with me."

The words stung him like a whip, lashing straight through to his soul. His heart stilled, and he slumped against the railing, suddenly boneless (--not real, never real-- how pathetic, thinking you could be worthy of an angel--)

"Oh." He sat straight down on the steps, directing his gaze towards his shoes. Something rose up in his chest and clogged his throat. He couldn't breathe. "Well, I guess...that's it, then." He wheezed, struggling with himself, trying to force out a wish for good luck or even just a tiny goodbye. But he couldn't get anything past the thick, painful knot choking him from the inside.

Distantly he heard Bumblebee continue out the door without saying another word, without even turning around. And another little piece of him died.

Without even realizing it, he had destroyed their friendship. The best thing that had ever happened to him was gone, and now his guardian angel no longer wanted to be around him. Didn't even want to _look_ at him. The knot twisted tighter. He gripped desperately at his hair, shaking.

Vaguely he was aware of things happening around him, of people talking and planning as though nothing had happened. As though his world hadn't just come to an end. And to make it even worse, he had hurt Optimus. The broken little pieces of him shiveled even further at the sharp-edged memory of the compassionate, wounded alien drawing back from him as if from a poisonous snake, flinching from the deadly sting of his words. He had only wanted to protect his friend.

Now, he had no friends at all.

But still he couldn't cry. He felt more wretched than he had in his entire life, sick with himself to the point of needing to throw up, but still no tears would come.

At some point the meeting must have ended, because when a large finger touched his back the room was empty save for a few humans busy at various consoles and the electric blue Jolt peering at him through the vertical bars holding up the hand rail. The finger smoothed down his back in a way he supposed was meant to be comforting, but it only reminded him of Bumblebee's tender ministrations and how the scout didn't even want to _look_ at the slimey human anymore, much less touch him. He leaned away from the contact, pulling himself to his feet.

"Hey. You okay?" Jolt asked softly. Sam twisted away to massage the inside corners of his eyelids, grateful that he didn't have to deal with hysterical human tears making him look pathetic on top of everything else.

"Yeah. I'm fine," he replied, in a voice not his own.

The Autobot didn't seem to believe him, but he accepted the statement without objection.

"Well, I'd thought we could do a tour after the meeting, but you look like you might just want to be alone right now. Come on, I'll show you your room!"

And he held out a blue hand at Sam's feet, wiggling his fingers invitingly. Sam brushed past the outstretched appendage and continued on down the steps.

"No thanks, I think I'll walk," he declined hoarsely.

"It's a long walk."

"Then I guess I'm taking a long walk."

Seeming reluctant, Jolt drew back his hand and straightened to his full height.

"Well, come on then."

Sam followed the Autobot out of the cavernous command center and down several long halls, occasionally having to pause at a steel blast door to confirm his identity before being admitted within. He knew he should have been trying to memorize the route, but he couldn't find the will to make the effort. Though the corridors were brightly lit and filled with voices and the continuous hum of life, he still somehow felt that he was being lead to a prison cell so deep beneath the earth that no one would ever find him.

Jolt pulled to a stop outside of the first human-sized blast door Sam had seen.

"Obviously, I can't go with you past here," the Autobot said apologetically, a bright arc of electricity cracking between his fingers. "This is the humans-only section. Gives you guys some privacy from us, since we can't get in after you. When you go in there, take the second hallway to the right. Your room is the third door on the left."

"Thank, Jolt," Sam replied dully, putting his hand to the panel set in the door to let it scan his finger prints and DNA. The security system recognized him with a wabrle of affirmation, letting the door slide into the wall. But Jolt stopped him before he could slip through.

"Don't worry about Bumblebee, Sam," the blue Autobot urged him, "He sometimes lashes out when he gets upset."

"Yeah," he replied thickly. Not really an answer-- he couldn't agree to 'not worry'. He might as well have tried to detach his legs. And he doubted that Bee was merely 'upset'. He was furious....and betrayed (--_'the most loyal being I have ever encountered_--'). Sam knew he had broken the yellow scout's trust, and his heart tore itself little pieces at the knowledge that it wasn't a forgivable offense (--'_I do not _want _you to come with me'-- ever_...).

With nothing more to say, he slipped through the door and let it slide closed behind him, never looking back. He wanted to like Jolt, he really did, but he didn't want to accept the comforting consolation prize-- like a kid being given a stuffed bear when her mom died. It was no replacement, and he hated the unspoken implication that it should be.

His feet led him down the path Jolt had described, leaving him standing before a smooth white door with no handle. Once more he pressed his hand to the indicated pad, and the door slid open with a woosh of air. The comparison to Star Trek was too obvious to miss, but he couldn't find any humor in it at the moment.

The room beyond was plain, yet not as barren as he had feared. Four white walls framed a decent sized space, a hard looking couch dividing the rectangular room into a living room area and a bedroom area. The floor was carpeted, thankfully, and a set of shelves already held at least two dozen books-- and several playstation games for the game console set up near the small TV. There was a door set into the side wall, and opening it he found he had his own bathroom, complete with a shower.

Retreating back into the main room, he began to root through drawers and open cabinets, finding much more than he had expected to find. There was no closet, but a wardrobe held several outfits (including a suit, to his discomfort-- he hoped he never had occasion to wear it), running shoes, tennis shoes, sandals and dress shoes. There were also additional blankets neatly folded on the shelf above. The dresser held even more clothes, as well as all those items that didn't need to be stored hanging up-- jeans, t-shirts, belts, sweaters (wouldn't ever need those, not with the Indian heat), collared shirts, slacks, socks, underwear, and even a brown hoody. Under the table beside the bed he even found a few board games, though unless he tripped over someone to play with they would be pretty useless.

Straightening, he turned to examine the bed. As a teenager, his first instinct was to sprawl bonelessly across it to test its sprawl-ability, then bounce on it like a little kid to try to touch the ceiling. But any thoughts of throwing himself onto the smoothly made covers evaporated at the sight of the small box tied with a ribbon sitting innocently on the pillow. He picked it up, and a small piece of folded paper fluttered to the ground.

Turning to sit on the edge of the bed, he leaned over and picked up the tiny note, weighing the gift in his other hand. It was small, and rather light. Nothing rattled when he shook it, meaning that it could have held anything from a bandana to air. Setting it beside him with a sigh, he unfolded the note.

_'Just a little something to brighten your day. --B_

_P.S.: You'll probably kick me for saying this, but welcome home.'_

The sight of the typed words caused the slip of paper to burn against his skin like a branding iron. A human must have come in and left it for him on the bed, probably before they had even left the aircraft carrier. And probably before that morning, when Bee had seemed mysteriously pissed at him. His friend probably regretted giving him whatever it was now.

His eyes burned and he scrubbed at them furiously, crumpling the note in his hand. Shooting up from the bed, he moved at an urgent clip across the room, desperate to be rid of the tiny box with its little bow and friendly message, unable to stand holding it, looking at it, for one more second. Its very presence reacted like ammonia to his guilt's bleach, sending up noxious fumes that threatened to choke him. Stalking to the desk, he flung both the gift and the crumpled slip of paper in the waste basket with such force that it tipped over on its side. He righted it, then thought better of leaving the two items in plain sight and carted the whole thing into the bathroom, setting it on the tile floor and leaving it there. He hurried back out into the main room, closing the door behind him on the sight of the mournful wastebasket adrift in a sea of white tile.

Returning to the desk, he pulled open drawers until he found a notepad and a pencil, then threw himself into the chair and settled down to plan.

Five minutes later he still had not come up with a mode of attack for approaching Lennox, though he had created several doodles of bombs being dropped on Megatron's head. Throwing down his pen, he looked at his sling and seriously contemplated reading Mikaela's note. He could really use some words of wisdom, or at least a humorous pick-me-up.

But then he thought of the endless years stretching ahead of him, thought of the possibility that he might be deprived not only of his girlfriend but also of his best friend, and decided that the message, too, was a gift better left unopened. At least for the moment. He didn't know if he would ever have the strength to open Bumblebee's gift, not knowing if it was meant to cheer a friend or consol a pet (--_don't need a _human_--don't need a _human--)

Because somehow, without even realizing it, he had become nothing more than an annoying bug once more (--'_I suggest you leave'_--'human'-- _disgusting, unworthy_--).

And that hurt the most of all.

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Author's note: I know that many of you out there probably hate my guts right now. I hate myself a little too. But before anyone starts breaking out the flamethrowers, keep in mind that you have trusted me this far-- trust me just a little while longer. Besides, I warned everyone that there would be double helpings of angst all around, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Though keep in mind that this story is far from over--- there are many more twists and turns, ups and downs coming before I reach the end.

As you've seen in this chapter, I have begun to introduce other transformers, mostly from the G1 universe. (Can you guess who made an appearance in this chapter? It's not as obvious as you'd think....two of them will take you by surprise). While I will not be creating any OC's, the fact that I have never watched G1-- and the fact that I'm trying to update everything for the movie universe-- might make them seem a little OOCish.

Lastly, Deserthermit has been kind enough to make a few pieces of artwork for this story (*squee!!*) and I would be delighted to post any other pictures people feel inspired to make both on my profile and my story.

Here are the links:

1) An unfinished illustration for 'Wanderings': rabid-werewolf(dot)deviantart(dot)com/art/Wanderings-130696878  
2) My favorite transformer (guess who!): rabid-werewolf(dot)deviantart(dot)com/art/Mirage-130694690


	10. Interlude: Ravage

Interlude: Ravage

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

.......Initializing systems operation.

Power core output: .001%

Stasis lock retrieval: Commencing....

Access approved. Unlocking: Core moderator program.....running....

Complete. Connection made. Power core output: 2.34445%

Charging....power core output: 3.112%

Initialize full systems scan: Running.....

.......

Structural integrity: 100%

Electrical systems: All circuits closed. 6.3453 million megavolts. Charging......

Sensor array: 100%. Reviewing sensory input.....

Error. Insufficient power. Secondary core moderator program: Online.

....charging....

Power core output: 15.7728%. Stabilizing....

Power core output: 34.01%.

Threshold reached. Initializing weapons systems....running....

Complete. All weapons online. Unlocking battle protocols....

Complete.

Charging....Power core output: 42.972%

Initializing personality matrix: Ravage....running.... Central Processing Unit analysis complete.

Primary function type: Autonomous symbiote, Class 3.4. Controller Unit/Primary Master: Decepticon, Designation: Soundwave: Higher lever Communications Unit, Class 14.

Primary designation of unit: Decepticon

Secondary designation of unit: Ravage

.....Personality matrix stabilized.

....Charging....

Power core output: 76.0002%

Incoming message logged: Request for initialization of data transfer link.

Requesting identity confirmation....

Confirmation recieved. Reviewing....approved. Transfer link accepted.

Downloading program package.....complete. Integrating file.

Running EXE program: Singular target incapacitation, singular target destruction.

.....Running....

Primary target acquired. Inegrating target data file into sensor array....

Imprinting complete. Target locked. Target designation: Mikaela Banes.

....Charging....

Power core output: 100%

/End Stasis lock. Rebooting all systems....

Complete. Unit: Ravage-- Status: Online.

Scanning current location-- Primary designation: Unknown. Secondary Terran designation: Io

Distance to target: 4.55723 tetra-clicks. Situation analysis: Current form unusable.

Initializing structural digression: Primary intra-space travel form. Commencing.....

Complete. Usable form assumed. Stabilizing power levels. Stabilizing radiation shield. Engaging thrusters....

Space flight achieved. Altering course....complete. Destination: Earth. Approximate ETA to destination: 3.547 milli-cycles.

.......

Status Report: System function optimal. ETA: 2.119 milli-cycles.

.......

Status Report: Renewing primary core output....complete. Thrusters stabilized. System function optimal. ETA: 1.74 milli-cycles.

......

Status Report: System function optimal. Planet fall imminent. Beginning landing procedures..... Deacceleration panels deployed. Thrusters reversed. Correcting course....

Planet fall achieved. Scanning systems.....complete. Minimal damage sustained. Initializing internal repairs....complete. Structural integrity: 100% Power core output: 98.72%.

Charging....

Power core output: 100%. Radiation shields stabilized. Uploading stealth program...complete. Blocking adjacent communications. Shielding spark signature.

Situational analysis: Current form unusable. Loading transformation program....complete. Commencing transformation....primary form assumed.

Further situational analysis required. Scanning location. Terran lifeform detected.

Analysis of lifeform: Physical threat minimal, probable posession of sentience. Reasoning: Structural form similar to primary target: Mikaela Banes and secondary target: Samuel Witwicky. Overlap comparison: 79% match.

Species match probable.

New situational anaylsis: Physical threat minimal. Exposure threat high. Conclusion: Exterminate terran lifeform.

Weapons protocols enga-- Error. Attempted action exceeds Target program parameters. Highest priority: Conceal Cybertronian presence. Probable result of weapons use: Exposure. Conclusion inadequate. Further evaluation needed.

Physical battle protocols engaged.

Target locked. Commencing deactivation of target....

.....

Anaylsis of target: No life signs registered. Reason: CPU structure removed from unit.

Deactivation complete: Target terminated.

Disengaging physical battle protocols. Fluid from deactivated target present on exterior. Composition: Dihydrogen monoxide, amino acids; trace amounts of iron, magnesium, calcium. Commencing exterior decontamination....complete. Fluid removed.

Scanning.....target: Mikaela Banes located. Distance to target: .002 clicks. Scanning target surroundings....complete. Structural defenses minimal. Multiple terran lifeforms around target: 23 ballistic-style weapons present. Assessing threat level....threat moderate. No Cybertronian presence. Chances of injury to unit: .13%

Target reacquired. Running Target program download.....opening program files.....

Information package discovered. Opening package....

New parameters assimilated. Reveiwing parameters....

Complete.

Primary target: Mikaela Banes. Secondary target: Samuel Witwicky. Nonspecific injury of primary target requested. Deactivation of primary target: Forbidden. Reviewing operational details for primary target.....complete. Highest priority: Secrecy of operation. Injury to primary target must appear accidental. Mission compromised if discovered by Autobots.

Reviewing operational details for secondary target....complete. Deactivation of secondary target requested. Limiting parameter: Attack restricted to specified planetary rotation. Secondary target must be lured from fortified surroundings. Bait: Nonspecific injury to primary target.

Scanning....

Further Target program parameters encountered. Holding pattern initialized. Specifications for time parameter: Absence of Autobot: Rachet from NEST human/Autobot resistance headquarters. Scanning for further information on Autobot: Rachet....

Scanning...

Autobot: Rachet. Current primary target of Decepticon, designation: Barricade. Mission parameters of Decepticon: Barricade-- Inflict disabling injury to target: Rachet. Processing data. Logical error detected. Scanning....Error. Files encrypted. Scource of encryption: Decepticon, designation: Starscream.

Sending file request to Controller Unit/ Primary Master: Soundwave. Waiting.....

Reply recieved.

::HOLD POSITION. AUTOBOT RETURN AHEAD OF INDICATED TIME FRAME. PREPARATION FOR SIMULTANEOUS ATTACKS/ DISTRACTIONS NOT YET COMPLETE. SECONDARY TARGET: SAMUEL WITWICKY WILL NOT APPEAR UNTIL ALL POSSIBILITY OF AUTOBOT PREVENTION IS REMOVED. AUTOBOT: RACHET MUST BE REMOVED FROM AUTOBOT HEADQUARTERS BEFORE DEPLOYMENT OF UNIT X AFTER DEACTIVATION OF SECONDARY TARGET::

Processing....Logcial error encountered. Composing message....complete. Sending message to Controller Unit/ Primary Master: Soundwave.

Waiting....

Reply recieved.

::IMMEDIATE DEACTIVATION OF AUTOBOT: RACHET WILL CAUSE SUSPICION IN OTHER AUTOBOTS. AUTOBOTS WILL NOT INFER OUR PLAN IF AUTOBOT: RACHET LEAVES UNDER OWN VIOLATION. DEACTIVATION OF AUTOBOT: RACHET TO OCCUR AFTER UNWITTING REMOVAL FROM BASE. UNIT X WILL BE DISCOVERED IF AUTOBOT: RACHET IS PRESENT AT ARRIVAL.::

Processing.....logical error encountered. Location: Target program, parameters for primary target: Mikaela Banes. Sending message to Controller Unit/ Primary Master: Soundwave.

Waiting....

Reply recieved.

::BYPASS PROGRAM PARAMETERS GOVERNING SPECIFIC INTERACTIONS WITH PRIMARY TARGET: MIKAELA BANES. SENDING AUTHORIZATION....::

Recieving additional data package...Package accepted. Downloading....Program parameters bypassed.

New message recieved.

::STARSCREAM MUST NOT BECOME AWARE OF OUR INTENDED BETRAYAL. PROBABILITY OF PLAN FAILURE IF RUSE DISCOVERED: 67.0235%. OBEY PROGRAM INSRUCTIONS REGARDING PRIMARY TARGET: MIKAELA BANES UNTIL SPECIFIED POINT. ARRANGE INDIRECT WOUNDING OF PRIMARY TARGET TO DRAW OUT SECONDARY TARGET. AFTER TERMINATION OF SECONDARY TARGET, INITIATE HIDDEN OPERATION: XXC74N12 WITH PRIMARY TARGET AS SUBJECT. ALL WILL KNOW TERROR AND DESPAIR BEFORE THE END, HUMAN AND CYBERTRONIAN ALIKE::

Instructions logged. Program parameters altered. Activating sleeper program: XXC74N12....

Complete.

Incoming messages logged and synchronized.

Initiating infinite loop of text in tertiary systems....

Complete.

::THE DARK GOD IS COMING::

::THE DARK GOD IS COMING::

Distance to target: 15.32 miles. Booting hunter program....complete. Initiating countdown to intercept of primary target: 23:54:13:49

23:54:13:45

23:54:13:39

23:54:12:58

:THE DARK GOD IS COMING::

::ALL HAIL UNICRON::

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Okay, as you guys can see this isn't a real chapter. Think of it more as an intermission in the story. I just felt that I needed to expound a little bit on all the delicious Decepticon plotting going on here so everyone doesn't get confused when things start happening very quickly in the next few chapters.


	11. Love, and all that implies

Sleep was a funny and rather tempermental thing.

Sam could fall asleep at the drop of a hat in front of the TV or nose down on the desk in history class, but whenever his fatigued mind needed sleep the most always seemed to be the exact time he could not force it to shut down. Have a final exam the next morning? No problem! Just wiggle under the covers, bury your head in the pillow and prepare to spend the next six to eight miserable hours making friends with the cracks in the ceiling. Funny how he seemed to wander around criminally stupid whenever he most needed to be quick on the uptake, then just when it would be appropriate to slip into a vegetative state, he found himself doing everything from constructing elaborate arias to following the tragic lives of those cracks in the ceiling. Well, maybe not the aria part.

On that particular night (and he only knew it was night from looking at his watch), he uncovered a previously hidden talent within himself for creating horror stories. Unfortunately, they all seemed to follow a similar theme; Bee encountering the Mirage, Bee losing to the Mirage, the Mirage feasting on Bee's titanium bones. Thown into the mix was a gut-twisting, spine-tingling array of Mikaela dying in a plane crash, Mikaela dying in a car wreck, Mikaela being gunned down by a mugger, Mikaela being gunned down by a Decepticon, Mikaela turning away from him and telling him flatly that she never loved him, that it was all a joke, even as the plane/car/mugger/Decepticon rendered her a splatter of blood and brain matter. Oh, and little bits of Optimus quietly saying that he was an ugly, disgusting, worthless little smear of organic matter and that he should never have been kind to him or told him about Bee's past, because it was obvious the human could never be trusted.

Needless to say, when he finally crawled into bed at 10:30, he could not get to sleep.

Dave had come by earlier, discovering him still hard at work at his surprisingly vast collection of Decepticon-bashing doodles. Sam hadn't been able to tell whether the look on the agent's face meant he was amused or disturbed. As it turned out, Sam had whiled away the entire dinner hour fruitlessly combing his brain for plans to piece what was left of his life back together and drag his sorry carcass from the hole he had dug. (Though he only had a scrapbook full of exploding stick-robots to show for it). So Dave had brought him a small tray of food, mysteriously filled with all his favorites (likely courtesy of a pre-pissed Bumblebee): pizza, macaroni and cheese, green beans, an apple and something that looked very much like a brownie. He had hailed the man as an angel, taken a bite of pizza to apease him, then promptly spat it back out again once the door closed behind him. The tray still sat there, untouched, on his desk. He left it to congeal, not the least bit hungry, and wondered if he would awake in the morning to discover a new species of sentient bacteria had spawned overnight.

Though Sam was convinced, given the endless litany of images running before his mind's eye, that he would never sleep, at some time around mindnight he finally drifted off. His dreams were not what he would have expected. Instead of seeing anyone maimed or being yelled at by anyone, he observed Bumblebee doing a host of the very normal-- yet at the same time very strange-- things. Each snippet of Bumblebee-favored dream featured the yellow scout in his camaro disguise, just driving. Never with a passenger, never involving Sam himself or Mikaela or anyone else. Sometimes he watched as if he were a bird overhead; sometimes he seemed to be standing right beside the Camaro, mysteriously drifting sideways along with it as it sped down the highway. But the scenary of the dreams was unfamiliar-- vast stretches of muddy roads winding through tropical jungles, gravel paths leading through semi-arid scrub along which passed donkeys and scores of men and women with coal black skin, a city built from layers of sagging slums filthy enough to put those in Egypt to shame.

But then his dreams mutated once more back into the familiar stream of Bee/Optimus/Mikaela horror, and the strange images of Bumblebee faded to the back of his mind.

At some point the nightmares became too hideous to allow him to remain asleep. He sat straight up with a gasp, forehead beaded with a sticky film of perspiration, hands fisted in the sheets. As usual, the source of his fear did not accompany him into the waking world-- after registering where he was (some barren room deep in the bowels of NEST) and that there was no reason for his sudden panic, he flopped back against the bed and looked at his watch. 2:13.

He swore up and down in the most creative way he could think of. Naturally, after spending an eternity trying to get to sleep, he would wake up only two hours later. Way to use those time management skills, Sam. Knowing he would rather deal with feeling shaky and sleep deprived then waste another few hours trying to imagine that the cracks in the ceiling looked like rainbows and unicorns rather than metal monsters that would kill them all, he threw back the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed. And sat there, massaging the side of his face.

Horror, despite being undefined horror, still trembled through him. The two people he cared most about in the world could have been in danger at that exact moment (--_silly, childish, overreaction_--) and he would never know. If only he could just CALL and see if they were _okay_--

Sam almost slapped himself for his stupidity. He _could_ call them-- he had both their phone numbers stored in his blackberry. Unless, of course, someone had taken away Mikaela's phone for security purposes, or Bee changed his call sign so that Sam couldn't contact him....

Sam shut down the thought before it could turn into another runaway guilt train, switching on the light and levering himself off the bed. A quick search through the heap of clothes left in a puddle on the floor turned up the marvelous little device, and he quickly switched it on, vibrating like a tunning fork in mingled excitement and anxiety as it powered up. As soon as the American flag filled the background (--_so much lost, nothing gained-- no more home_--) he punched in Mikaela's number and brought the phone to his ear. Nothing. Not even a dial tone.

Furious with the way the universe seemed determined to thwart him, he looked back at the screen to make sure he had the number right. Only then did he notice the little blinking icon in the corner that meant he had no signal.

(Duh, Sam. Way to be a genius. You're only beneath, what, a hundred feet of solid bed rock?). If he wanted to call anyone at all, he would need to borrow one of the land-lines hooked up in the bustling command room. Either that, or make his way to the surface. Deciding he would much rather not have to face anyone, he pulled on his new hoody over the top of his baggy t-shirt and slipped the phone into one pocket, practically sprinting (well, okay, shuffling) for the door as he went.

Then, thinking better of wandering around an alien fortress without some way of protecting his feet from loose nails or other freaky alien stuff, he backtracked to the wardrobe and fished out the pair of tennis shoes. Not bothering with socks-- not even bothering to waste time sitting down-- he hopped around on one foot while pulling a shoe on the other.

Not a particuarly bright move, given his overall coordination. He wobbled, stumbling back, and began to fall-- he flailed out with his good arm, trying to grab the edge of the desk as he passed to stop himself, and ended up slicing open the outside of his forearm on the sharp corner. A white hot flash of pain erupted along his arm as the flesh was torn open, though it faded again in the wake of an abrupt introduction to the floor. (Ow.)

Groaning, he sat up and inspected the damage to his arm. The cut was fairly long-- about six inches-- though not very deep, bleeding only sluggishly. It stung like hell, though, so shaking slightly with adrenaline he ventured into the bathroom to clean it up. There was no disinfectant lying around, so he settled for scrubbing it clean with soap and water (OW! OW! OW!) and winding toilet paper around it in a make-shift bandage. Slightly icky, giggle inducing, but effective-- blood seeped through and spotted the paper in places with red, though for the most part the bleeding appeared to have stopped. He pulled the sleeve of his hoody over his injured arm, hiding the gorey bandage from view.

Possesed of much more caution and less fiery need than he had minutes before, he went back into the main room and put on the other shoe, sitting down this time before trying to slip it on. His injury did do one positive thing, though-- it settled the fear twanging like a guitar string in his chest, wiping away the last wisps of horror carried over from dreamland. He was exhausted, reluctantly hungry, and in pain from two injuries instead of just one (though the broken arm definitely won out on the agony scale, alien miracle drug or no). For a moment he contemplated simply getting back into bed and trying to sleep for a few more hours. He needed to have all his wits about him if he intended to approach Lennox the next day without a plan, and the same eyes that had refused to cry before now itched and stung with tiredness.

But....

But he couldn't just let things lie in their current state. If his estimation were correct, Mikaela would be boarding a plane back to the US in a little under 20 hours, giving him only 20 hours to try to figure out a plan, maybe less. Then there was the issue of Bumblebee. Bumblebee, who may or may not have been fighting for his very life at that exact moment (--_invisble hands clawing, grasping, tearing-- Bumblebee, no!--)_, and who, seemingly, hated his guts.

Heart twisting at the very thought of Bumblebee dying before he had the chance to apologize, he pushed himself to his feet, swayed dizzily for a moment, then headed for the door at a more sedate pace. No mishaps befell him this time. He flicked off the lights and exited the room without incuring another injury.

It was disturbing to meander down brightly lit hallways with his body clock telling him that it should be dark during the wee hours of the morning. He wondered at that for a moment, then realized that the lights were probably dimmed in the military barracks for those who stayed on base over night. He was probably the only overnight resident in this part of the base, and therefore whoever controlled the lights saw no reason to inconvenience those working the late shift to make the hallway lighting reflect the sun so many feet above.

While his original plan had been to backtrack to the elevator, start it up, and call Mikaela and Bee from the surface, the daytime lighting and the presence of a continual stream of worker bees (who looked at him strangely for wearing pajamas) did the trick of waking him up and brought him back to his senses. Not only was the command center likely to be filled even in the middle of the night, he didn't know the password to start the elevator. Neither did he particularly relish the thought of being shot for setting off the proximity alarms they surely had at ground level. No bullets for Sam today, thank you. If there _was_ another way to get to the surface, he could waste days trying to find it and might still be thwarted for the same reasons. His only choice was to abandon the cellphone plan and seek out a land line in some back room where witnesses would be scarce.

In the interests of finding an unused conference room somewhere, he began to detour down the loneliest, oldest hallways he could find. There was a visible difference in the contruction material of the walls that allowed him to track approximately when they had been built. The smooth, white paneling seemed to be characteristic of the newest areas, bare metal plating belonging to a construction period before that. Those few tunnels shaped from raw concrete appeared to be the oldest of the bunch. Whenever possible he turned down concrete corridors, until he found himself wandering along a hallway old enough that the wires for the overhead lighting had not been hidden away and orange moisture stains created swirling patterns on the walls.

When he felt that he was far enough from civilization (far enough to be partially lost, in fact) not to be bothered by a random passerby, he began opening doors. As the hallway itself was large enough for a transformer to fit through, some of the doors were similar to roll away metal garage doors and far too heavy to lift. The rest were human sized, though most of those were locked tight. The ones that weren't led to other hallways, and he had no desire to become even more lost than he already was.

Turning onto another empty hallway, a faint trickle of sound caught his attention like a hook snaring a fish. He turned his head this way and that, trying to determine its source past the myriad of warped echoes, and was drawn to the corridor branching off to the left. He turned the corner and started down the decrepit hallway, listening intently to the otherworldly sound. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as it began to grow louder; it reverberated from the sloping concrete walls, dripped like water from the sagging bundles of wires running overhead, turned the buzzing orange light eery and foreboding-- like the wane, flickering lights of a deserted subway station just before the unnamed horror emerged from the dark. If he had to compare the sound to anything, he would have said it resembled a cross between a generator shorting out and two rusty metal plates grinding against each other. Whatever it was, it wasn't a sound he would hope to hear on an in-flight airplane. Or riding in a car. Or anywhere, period.

The corridor he had chosen dead ended onto another transformer-sized door. Except that this door, unlike the others, stood open. Here the sounds reached their peak-- still no louder than a washing machine, they nonetheless grated painfully on his ears. As impossible as it seemed, the jaw-grinding sound held a note of almost infinite sadness, intangible yet all the more real for its ghostly, ethereal quality. It was the essence of anguish as expressed through sound, an agonized symphony composed by the wounded and bleeding heart, as beautiful as it was terrible.

With the sense the he had stepped out of time and place into a world where he did not belong, Sam crept slowly towards the open door, peering around the edge into the dusty gloom within. Several blinks were required for his eyes to adjust to the sudden drop in light. But when he could finally make out what awaited in the gray pall, he wished he had never succumbed to his curiosity.

It was a graveyard.

In humans, the very name brought to mind images of grassy fields spotted with headstones, gnarled oak trees holding back the dreary patter of rain and shading black processions of mourners with their leafy bows, midnight scares with flashlights and pillowcase ghosts. Sometimes creepy, sometimes sorrowful, and even sometimes peaceful, but only growing things and carved stone, nothing more.

_This_ graveyard made its home not in a small field, but in a cave of concrete. There were no headstones, no trees, no statues of angels. The four bodies stored within remained uninterred-- four empty metal corpses laid out in a row. No caskets, no head stones, only twisted armor still bearing the death wounds, only unlighted optics which stared like glassy eyes, unblinking. Sam leaned against the door frame, suddenly very grateful he had not eaten anything as he recognized those within. Jazz. Jetfire. An Autobot he could not name and had never seen, most likely a new arrival who had come to Earth only to find his death. They had not been spread across the room to fill the space, but had rather been laid out in carefully measured garden plots. Made sense, of course, to have space set aside and ready to fill with the dead that would undoubtably come.

Mudflap.

Skids.

Rachet.

Ironhide.

Optimus.

Bumb--

(No. Don't think about that. He's coming back-- he has to. I haven't gotten the chance to say I'm sorry. He can't leave before I get to say goodbye...).

But as Sam slowly pulled himself away from the horror of seeing those who had only so recently been alive, he came to realize that he was not the only living being occupying the room. In the opposite corner from the other three deactivated Autobots lay the Arcee. And leaning over her, arms braced on either side of her body, knelt Jolt. Optics darkened until their glow could hardly be precieved in the dark, he fidgeted restlessly, moving as though he could not find a comfortable position, one hand coming up to touch her then retreating away again. Slowly, piercingly, it dawned on Sam that his movements were not from boredom or anxiety, but from pain-- the electric blue robot swayed and shuddered, rocking back and forth, caught in the iron grip of an internal agony that screamed for release when there was none to be found. And he realized that the grating, sorrowful sound he had heard came not from malfunctioning equipment, but from Jolt.

As if suddenly coming to a decision, the bouncy, happy, electric-blue robot braced himself more securely over Arcee, moving one hand to rest lightly on the armor over her chest. Crackling energy raced along his body, and with the buzzing thunderclap of a circuit connecting a forked bolt of bluish lightning leapt from his hand into her body. It snapped and seared along the outside of her armor, throwing out tiny arcs of electricity, then finally disappated. Nothing happened.

A metallic whine briefly cut through the grating sound of anguish-- a harsh, jarring note like a scream of frustration. Leaning away slightly, Jolt placed both his hands over her spark chamber, blue armor beginning to spark and hiss with captured lightning once more. Another resounding crack, and the stored electricity raced down his arms into the unresponsive metal. This time the scrap beneath his hands jerked slightly, then lay still. Nothing. No movement, no life. Dead, dead, dead.

"We feel sorrow, but we cannot cry," A voice whispered quietly from behind him. Jerking around as though he himself had been electrocuted, Sam looked up to find Sideswipe kneeling behind him, silver armor gleaming harshly in the orange light, watching the scene unfold in the Autobot graveyard.

"What...." Sam gasped out, not quite remembering how to speak, and motioned helplessly to Jolt. Equiped with sensors powerful enough to track an ant from three miles away, Jolt should have long since noticed their presence. The god-like being should not have continued to kneel there unaware of his surroundings, caught up in a vice of grief so human that the sight of it frightened Sam far more than any Decepticon had the power to do. Neither realizing nor caring that he had an audience, the blue Autobot once more charged himself with a lightning storm worth of energy, and again he unleashed it into the corpse beneath his hands. The anguished scream that followed when once again life did not return to Arcee forced Sam to clap his hands over his ears.

"We were a quad," Sideswipe explained, manner subdued. (--_how strange to see something so powerful, so alien in its construction crouching in a concrete hallway and speaking in a human voice_--). "After the destruction of Vector Sigma, we fled Cybertron together and began roaming the galaxy, looking for allies and a place to settle in peace. But we could remain nowhere for long, as most planets proved inhospitable."

"U-unfriendly natives?" Sam heard himself ask. He could not tear his eyes from Jolt-- though he felt sickeningly like a voyeur, he was drawn to the scene the way passing motorists were drawn to look at the carnage of a devastating highway wreck.

"No." The sound of purified sorrow grew in volume, winding around them, digging deep into Sam's bones with an exquisite pain. Another powerful jolt of energy-- another shock with the defibrillator to a heart long still, another inhuman sob of immortal despair. "Most planets in the universe produce no life. We were....lonely beyond words. I had my bonded brother, and Jolt....Jolt almost had Arcee."

As though finally reaching some indefinable point of desperation, Jolt abandoned using his hands alone and pulled the unresisting metal corpse into his arms, clutching it desperately to him in a way Sam had never seen from the alien visitors. Being robotic in nature, they did not usually engage in physical contact. Unless they were fighting, or unless there was no other way-- no words to speak, no radio to use, no sub-space message that could be relayed-- they refrained from touching. But now, when no other contact was possible, physical touch became a refuge, a panicked line cast out into the black eternity, hoping the one they sought would grasp the other end. Once more Jolt filled himself with the energy of a powerplant, of a lightning storm, and this time when the current was unleashed it twined around them both, crackling over deepy scarred pink without effect, glancing off and dissipating into the stale air.

Jolt's anguished song became a trembling howl, so full of sorrow that Sam felt a tear escape silently down his own cheek. It was the agony not only of a single loss, but a lifetime of loss, an eternity of loss. Sam had no idea whether Cybertronians died from old age, but even thirty million years might as well have been an infinite number of years. Another crystal drop of moisture followed the first, running down his chin and darkening a circle on the concrete floor. Humans, at least, only had to wait forty or fifty years before joining those who had gone before them to the other side. An immortal, he suddenly realized with a stab of sympathy, had no such promise to hold on to. For them, death truly was the end. He shivered violently, shuddering away from the thought of what it would be like to shake hands with the grim reaper every day as the Autobots did, always knowing that beyond the smiling skull lay nothing but a void of darkness, a night with no dawn.

Sam somehow knew, without needing to be told, that this was the not the first time Jolt had tried to bring Arcee back to life.

His mouth had gone dry. He swallowed a few times, running his tongue over his teeth, and finally gather the courage to ask, "'Almost had Arcee'? W-what does that mean?"

Displaying a gentleness contrary to what Sam had seen the day before, Sideswipe lifted him into his hands and pulled back from the open doorway, turning away from the metal and concrete graveyard. Though he could no longer see Jolt, the robotic cries continued unabated, painting a picture as vivid as reality behind his eyelids. Sam wondered how long it would be before the image faded entirely. Something told him it would be a very, very long time, if ever.

"They initiated a spark bond about fifty of your years ago," Sideswipe answered quietly, voice only a murmur, "But Jolt was reluctant to complete it at first. By the time he finally came to his senses, everyone was needed to fight back against the Fallen, giving them no opprotunity to cement the bond....and when the enemy finally fell, it was too late."

Jolt's mournful song faded from hearing as they passed from concrete to metal to white paneling, though the sound of it continued to echo within his mind as though it had never ceased. Sideswipe's tale raised a torrent of memories in his mind, showing him violent flashes of the battle in Egypt-- at the mention of Arcee, the mental recording halted over the split-second flash of a cannon blast blowing open the side of her head just as she approached the two humans. That was it. No dramatic speeches, no heroic theme music as the valiant warrior goes out in a blaze of glory. One second she had been there, alive and real, and the next-- BOOM. She was dead. (--_how can something so terrible happen so quickly?_--)

For once content to hang unresisting in the metal grip, Sam felt a prickle of curiosity returning. "What's a spark bond?"

The angular head whipped towards him, posture radiating astonishment.

"Have you truly spent nearly two years in our presence and never once heard of a spark bond?" Sideswipe asked at last.

Sam crossed his arms over his chest, feeling slightly annoyed. "Most of the time I was only around Bumblebee. And things like freaky alien bonds weren't usually topics that came up a lot."

"Of course. Bumblebee," Sideswipe murmured, almost to himself. Though the silver robot possesed no eyes to speak of, the chrome visor remained tilted in his direction, and Sam couldn't supress the creepy-crawly feeling that he was being watched intently. "I don't know whether to applaud him or gun him down myself. No wonder you have no idea."

Sensing a mysterious undercurrent of exasperation to the words, Sam held his silence, waiting for Sideswipe to finish his explanation. He didn't know what Bee could have had to do with Jolt's bond to Arcee, but he chalked up the silver Autobot's annoyance with the scout to another one of those weird alien things he would probably never get.

At last Sideswipe continued, "The easiest way I can describe a spark bond is to compare it to some of your tribal rituals involving the exchange of blood between newly weds."

"...You mean they swap lubricant or something?"

"Hardly. I should have mentioned that it's a very inadequate comparison, especially since the process of spark bonding involves the equivalent of swapping _all_ blood rather than a small sample. And no physical liquids are used in creating a spark bond.

"What, then?"

In almost no time it all they had returned to the recently contructed portions of the base. Although the hallway they occupied was remote enough that no one else lingered in sight, the overhead lights held a day-glow brilliance rather than an orange tint, and neither bundles of wires nor water stained concrete could be seen under the flouride-white paneling. Coming to a stop, Sideswipe set him lightly back on his feet, retreating back a step and lowering himself into a crouch as Sam turned to face the silver Autobot.

"Energy," he replied, "A spark bond is achieved by synchronizing the radiation signatures of both sparks. With both 'vibrating' at the same frequency, they are able to slip easily into contact with one another, almost to the point of merging. Though most of the time they remain separate, an unbreakable link is created between them, a bridge of sorts woven from the essence of both sparks."

"Okay. I think I mostly understand that. But how are the sparks synchronized?"

"Through an exchange of energy, as I have said. Both partners in the bond give their spark energy to the other, and that energy is what forces every metaloid cell to alter its structure to resonate with the other spark. Attempting the bond can frequently be very dangerous-- normally, draining the spark of energy results in death."

Sam felt himself going as pale as the walls. "Then why aren't those who do it dead, then?"

"Because each partner _giving_ energy _recieves _energy as well. Normally, our bodies will reject the energy from another spark, but by purposefully draining their own spark, each partner forces it to accept the energy from another, thus creating the bond. Back on Cybertron, some speculated that the practice came about accidentally through an attempt by two dying friends to each save the other, resulting in the spark synchronization."

Sam shuddered again, trying to rid himself of the last vestiges of horrified sorrow that lingered from the encounter with Jolt in the graveyard. He only partially succeeded; the haunting cry of despair continued to echo within his memory, but concentrating on the logical-- though slightly disturbing-- discussion of soul bonding helped take some of the chill from his bones.

"So Jolt only had a partial bond?"

"Yes. The first threads of the bond can be established without an _exchange_ of energy, since infusing another with surface radiation is not draining enough to require an influx to replace it. Jolt was afraid to risk Arcee by having her drain her own spark, so he gave a tiny portion of his energy to her to establish the first tenative link between them. His desire to protect her robbed him of the chance to know the completion of a full bond."

"Is it like marriage?"

An electronic snort. "I _told_ you that the comparison to the human bonding ritual was inadequate. We have no genders, which means we do not mate as you do. The absence of mating renders monogamy obsolete. I have seen many cases of circular bonding, and even one instance where fourteen individuals had decided to bond. Most of the time, however, the partners in a spark bond do not branch out beyond the inclusion of a third member, and in some cases the bond between two individuals is so deep they see no need to bond with anyone else, even after their partner's death."

The horror returned like the tidal rush of the ocean as the implications of that sunk in. Jolt and Arcee hadn't just been close to getting married-- they'd been on the brink of joining their very _souls_. Sam couldn't fathom the pain of losing Mikaela for even a few decades, much less for millions of years. The thought of not only losing a _girlfriend_ for an eternity, but losing a _soulmate_ for an eternity.....he felt as though he had been granted a glimpse down an impossibly dark well, a well which descened down, down, into the abyss, down past all thought and reason, down into the black eternity from which nothing returns. The strength Jolt must have possesed to continue living, much less to continue living with any degree of sanity and (--_good God_--) an upbeat attitude....all their inhuman physical strength couldn't hold a candle to the strength of their minds and mechanical hearts.

Trembling with a fresh surge of awe and sorrow, Sam stumbled across a question that had first occured to him when boarding the aircraft carrier, one that had soon slipped from his mind in light of other events. "Is that why Jolt wasn't on the aircraft carrier with us?" Sam tried to say, but only managed to whisper. "How did he get back?"

The silver visor tilted towards him, but he couldn't judge any emotion from the rigid face.

"When he felt Arcee's death through the bond, he was almost out of control. Luckily he was able to come back to himself rather than fall into insanity, and he demanded to be airlifted alongside her back to base. Prime should have come too," he suddenly growled, "But of course he was far too stubborn to see to his own wounds."

Sam's mind whirled, little red flags popping up right and left as Sideswipe straightened again in preparation to leave. Apparently, having a long discussion with a human was cramping his style.

"But that doesn't make sense," Sam protested, "I thought we all had to come back on the aircraft carrier because there weren't enough cargo planes to lift everyone out!"

Sideswipe blew out a short burst of static that was almost a snort. "As if. For all the things you have accomplished, you seem rather thick when it comes to the motivations of others." The silver alien cut him off before he could object, adding, "Everyone could have been easily airlifted from Egypt, but Prime vetoed the plan, deciding that it would be better to take the week long trip by boat instead."

Sam could only gape, still not following the train of thought. "_Why?"_

"Because of you, as smallish and mostly uninteresting as you are," despite the harsh bite of his words, Sideswipe crouched once more to bring them to the same level, "For some reason above and beyond honor that I've yet to figure out, he cares about you. Enough to delay his own healing to give you a week of relative normalcy with your creators and mate."

In the wake of the silver Autobot's revelation, the weighty parasite of guilt began to writhe and squrim again in his chest. Optimus had done nothing but try to help him, and he'd gone and given the compassionate robot the equilvalent of a bitch slap. There was no way he could ever show his face around him again, not without sensing a common ancestry with the pond-scum maggot. Maybe he could simply crawl into a dark hole and pull the hole in after him.

"What about you?" he asked, mostly to distract himself, "Why weren't you there in Egypt?"

Sam had anticipated hearing that Sideswipe had been incapacitated due to an injury, rendering him unable to join the other Autobots. So it came as a shock when the robot abruptly stood up, stance going rigid as he towered over the human.

"Think about what Jolt looked like moments ago," he growled, _growled_, in a manner so alien that Sam was forcefully reminded that he was speaking to a being from another planet rather than a human in funky silver armor. "Think about that sound you heard, and remember that _he_ never possesed a full bond." Sideswipe turned from him, visor catching the light in a menacing glint. His voice fell, becoming a quiet rumble no less terrifying for its lack of volume. "Perhaps that will give you an idea of what it's like to lose a fully spark-bonded brother."

Without another word, the silver alien turned his back on Sam stalked away down the corridor, retreating back into the bowels of the subterranian base-- returning to the graveyard; returning to Jolt, the only surviving member of his quad.

It was far from cold inside NEST, but even after he had uprooted his feet from the floor and spent five minutes retracing his steps through the hallways, he still could not stop shivering.

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Despite his earlier fears, it seemed that the techie traffic DID slack off towards 3am. Where before there had hardly been enough room between bodies to squeeze in a mug of coffee (though somehow they had still managed to do just that in abundance), now only about fifteen human workers monitored the various screens in the cathedral-sized command room. The few that looked up at his entrance stopped to stare, obviously not expecting to see a teenager in striped pajama pants and a brown hoody come wandering in like a displaced ghost. Those that smiled he boldly walked up to and announced that he wanted to go topside, to which he recieved even _more_ strange looks and endless variations on the word 'no'.

When he asked around for an open landline, some kind soul at last took pity on him gave him directions to a room used for experiments that would most likely be unoccupied (and would most likely boast of an unused phone). Thanking the man, he shuffled off to find the indicated room.

Though the hallways in that particular portion of the base were also new, the number of people he encountered soon dropped to zero, leaving him free to sprint the rest of the way without fear of being observed. At last he came upon another titanium blast door at the end of the hallway and pressed his palm into the pad.

::Access Denied::

"What?"

He had yet to encounter a door with an identification pad that would not open at his touch, and the fact that this particular one now rejected his clearance came as a shock. Abruptly angry at the way inanimate objects seemed determined to stymie his efforts to talk to his girlfriend and best friend (--please, be safe--), he jammed his hand down onto the pad again, fully expecting to be rejected once more. So when the panel lit up green with a warble of affirmation he could only stare in shock, jumping back as the door slid open.

"Okay, that was weird," he announced to the hallway. But determined not to squander his good fortune, he hurried inside before the door could decide to be spiteful and close on him again.

The room he found himself in was large, though no where near as large as the command center. Although shealthed in metal and ringed with advanced machines and consoles that defied description, there were no platforms for humans to stand on, no giant screens mounted on the wall, nada. Even the center of the room was left conspiciously bare, save for a wooden table that looked very out of place in the sea of metal and two swivel chairs. And despite the techie's assurances, he was not alone in the room.

Off to one side, a cord from his wrist jacked into a piece of equipment, stood the green Autobot that had ealier given him a friendly salute. This time he did not look up, but merely warbled something in Cybertronian to the other occupant of the room. A tall man in a white cowboy hat stood with his back to Sam near the table, facing the green Autobot.

At the alien rumble, the man replied in english, "It's alright, Hound. In fact, it'll be good for us to get some data on the interaction capabilities. Just continue to monitor the energy usage the way you've been doing."

His voice startled Sam. Rather than the rough country drawl he'd been expecting, the man spoke with a smooth baritone timbre that held both unquestionable authority and compassion at the same time. To Sam's ears, it could have been a replica of Jesus' voice-- if Jesus had been into blue jeans and cowboy hats.

"Is this a bad time?" He called to the man. The good natured part of him hoped that he wasn't fouling up some uber-important experiment; the selfish part of him did a voodoo dance that they would slink away like kids caught shoplifting and leave him to make a phone call in peace.

The green Autobot-- Hound, the man had called him-- looked over to him as he spoke, then flicked a glance at the cowboy wannabe rather than reply. Strangely enough, the Autobot seemed almost nervous, though Sam hadn't the faintest idea why. The man turned as well, though unlike the alien he greeted Sam with a warm smile, the expression somehow far more genuine than any other smile he had ever seen. Like the man was _really_ happy to see him, even relieved, but without getting all giddy and mushy about it. Weird.

"No, no. Not at all. Come join us!" he beckoned.

The sound of his voice, coupled with the small, kind smile gracing his features, washed over Sam in a way that seemed so familiar he couldn't help but offer a tiny smile in return. If he didn't know better, he would have said that he had met the man somewhere before.

Now that the stranger had turned around, Sam was able to take better stock of his appearance. Needless to say, it certainly made an impression. The guy was _tall_, maybe six-five or so. Well muscled, but not bulky, like a man used to working hard every day and gaining the lean, powerful build to show it. His clothes were simple, but rather exotic for any place other than a farm in Texas-- tough blue jeans, brown leather boots, a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose steel-banded forearms. And, of course, the white cowboy hat nestled on a head of thick brown hair. His face was handsome, as far as Sam could tell (not being a girl and unable to really judge other guys), but somehow bland-- cheek bones sharp but not too angular, jaw strong but not bulging, eyes a faded-denim blue that was both enrapturing and forgettable. All told, he just looked _normal_. Or he would have, if not for the network of pale scars running across every inch of exposed skin. Though hardly noticable even up close, the sight of them caused Sam to shiver, wondering just what had made them and how the man had gotten so very many.

Despite the impulsive desire to simply turn around and find another room-- unused, this time-- Sam found himself walking towards the displaced table and chairs, keeping a careful distance from the stranger. Familiar or not, anyone who smiled like that-- like they knew him-- usually turned out to be bad news.

"I know it's, like, really late at night, but is there a landline in here I could use to make a phone call or two? I have some...friends I need to check up on. You know, see if they're okay."

The man frowned sympathetically, approaching him slowly. Sam held his ground, not quite sure what to make of a guy that would wear a cowboy hat indoors, much less in an underground super-secret base in _India_. Hopefully he was just quirky and not a homicidal fruit loop.

"Hate to be the bearer of bad news, son, but we've shut down the phones in here for the moment so that the electrical feedback doesn't interfere with the experiment we're running."

Sam wanted to let loose a frothing blue cloud of swearing at the news, but he suddenly felt far too tired and beaten down to really care. Instead he just sighed, slumping a little, and shrugged.

"Lost cause, I guess," he glanced towards Hound, finding the green Autobot's attention once again riveted to the flickering screen of data before him. "Well, good luck with your experiment, whatever it is."

He turned to go.

"Hold up a minute," the man called to him, striding closer, "You don't look so good. Everything okay?"

The gathering frustration inside of him suddenly welled up and bubbled over. Without turning around he shrugged again, threw up his hands with a grunt, and started making all sort of aborted gestures of frustration with his arms, ending with a shrug again. Great. He just had to go and make himself look like a lunatic.

The man stepped closer, stopping about three feet behind him. "Need someone to talk to?" He asked kindly.

"No!" Sam snapped, then felt guilty. It wasn't the cowboy's fault that everything was so screwed up he couldn't even get out a phone call. "No," he repeated more calmly, "Everything's great. Everything's fine. Of course it is! I've only lost my chance to call my girlfriend before she leaves to go home, my best friend hates my guts, and to top it all off I went and said something awful to this guy that's done nothing but try to help me, and--" Aburptly he cut himself off, realizing something. He turned back around to face the man, whose expression had morphed to one of polite concern, and smiled sheepishly. "Alright. Maybe I _could _use someone to talk to. But I'm warning you-- I have a lot I need to bitch about."

Normally Sam wouldn't have even considered spilling his guts to a complete stranger, but a little voice in the back of his mind kept whispering that he _knew_ the guy from somewhere and that he could trust him, hat and all.

The warm grin spread once more across the man's face. "I think I can handle it."

Trying to make up for having been a babbling jerk, Sam made the first move and stepped forward, holding out his hand. "Sorry about all the weirdness. Let's start over. --Hi, I'm Sam. I'm new here."

The man's grin stretched even wider, eyes glinting in a way that made it seem like he was enjoying an inside joke, and he held out his own hand in response. "Nice to meet you, Sam. Name's Orion. Orion Pax."

They clapsed hands. Despite Sam's wild fears of having his bones ground together in a test of manly fortitude, Orion's grip was strong but not painful, skin pleasantly warm and dry.

"Orion? Like the constellation?"

Again the mysterious smile. "My family has a thing for stars."

Sam relaxed his grip, preparing to end the handshake and step back. But the act of stretching out his arm had caused the sleeve of his hoody to ride up slightly, exposing the toilet paper bandage underneath. Blue eyes zeroed in on the incriminating glimpse, and when Sam moved to reclaim his hand Orion refused to let go. Instead the man pulled him closer, using his own grip on Sam's hand to twist his arm around, exposing more of the bandage.

"Hey!" Sam squawked in outrage. Orion ignored him, using his other hand to force up the sleeve of his hoody, revealing the blood-spotted dressing shielding the cut he'd gotten from scraping his arm on the corner of his desk. Gingerly the man grasped the crook of Sam's elbow, turning the captured limb for a better look at the tightly wrapped paper coils. His eyes narrowed.

"You should get that looked at," Orion instructed at last, releasing him.

As soon as he was freed Sam backed away, huffily tugging his sleeve back into place. He wanted to be furious at the way he'd just been man-handled and had his privacy invaded, yet something about Orion kept him from being mad at him for long. The sense of familiarity was so strong the man's name had been a let down-- he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he'd never met an Orion Pax before. But even that could not dislodge the sense of primal recognition.

"No offense," he said suddenly, trying to keep the conversation going and shake off the unnerving feeling, "But what's with the clothes?"

Orion only shrugged, once more at ease. "It's casual friday."

Now Sam had factual proof that the man did, indeed, have a screw loose somewhere. "No, it's not. It' thursday."

"Actually, because it's almost three hours past midnight, it IS friday," Orion explained patiently. Oh. Duh.

"Um. Well, uh..." (--_don't look at the hat-- don't look at the hat!--)_

Regardless of his firm mental commands his eyes roved upwards to goggle at the white cowboy replica. Following his gaze, Orion lifted his left hand and touched the brim of his hat, affording Sam a glimpse of a gold wedding band encircling his ring finger.

"Don't like my hat?" He asked in a mock wounded voice.

"I like it in _priciple_," Sam stressed, trying not to further insult the man, "Just maybe not at 3am in a metal warren full of space aliens. Adds another excess layer of strangeness."

Sam winced at his own words, but Orion responded with a patient smile and swept the hat from his head, running his other hand through his hair to shake out the hat-shaped impression. He looked much younger, and somehow much more imposing, without the hat-- maybe 28, 30 years old at the most, with an aura around him that wouldn't have been out of place for an actor playing King Aurthor.

"Much better," Sam approved, watching as Orion began to absently rotate the hat around and around in his hands. With a chuckle, the man placed it on the table and sunk into one of the swivel chairs, spinning around once before propping his feet up and motioning for Sam to join him.

Sam hesitated, but only for a moment. Sure, the guy was a little strange (and a LOT intimidating) but he already felt curiously at ease around him, instinctually trusting that he meant no harm. So with an internal shrug, he plopped himself down in the other swivel chair, taking a moment, as Orion had, to simply enjoy spinning around and around.

"So....you married?" He asked. There. Nice and simple. A safe conversation starter.

Or so he thought. Orion's smile faded slightly, eyes growing distant for a moment. When the smile returned it seemed more forced than before, tinged with ancient sadness.

"Was," He answered as lightly as ever, "But my wife was murdered many years ago by my best friend."

Sam stopped spinning. His mind reeled from the sudden blow of the unsoftened revelation, all the polite questions he had stored up (--'got any kids?'--) fizzling away on his tongue.

"...That SUCKS," he said at last, unable to think of anything remotely comforting to say. What was he supposed to tell the guy--_ 'I'm sure she's in a better place'_? He didn't think he had the stomach to come out with that one, given that the horror of watching Jolt trying to bring Arcee back to life still lingered far too fresh in his mind.

"Yes, it does," Orion murmured quietly, looking away from him, hands clenching briefly into fists before relaxing again. "But enough of that. You're here to bitch at _me_, not the other way around. Besides," he grinned again, "It's a very long story, and far too depressing to tell right now. So go on-- you were looking for a phone?"

"Well...." Sam stalled by trying to prop his feet up to mirror Orion's posture, failing miserably when he realized his legs weren't long enough. "See, to understand why I needed a phone, I'm going to have to spew a lot of background information. Otherwise you'll end up totally lost."

Orion gestured with an open hand, the corners of his mouth twitching at Sam's failed attempts to put his feet on the table. "So spew."

But Sam couldn't, not with an audience. He glanced up at Hound, wondering if talking to Orion was such a good idea after all with the green Autobot in the room (especially since he didn't know whether or not Hound would keep what he learned under his hat). But Orion, sensing his discomfort, waved away his fears.

"Don't worry about Hound. He's got his hands full monitoring all the data coming in. 'Sides, I have it on the highest authority that he's good at keeping his mouth shut."

"Well...." Sam gripped the arms of the swivel chair, settling for watching the floor whirl beneath him as he pushed himself around and around. "Here's the thing. See, I have this friend..." And he stopped, not knowing how to continue.

"Go on," Orion urged, not looking the least bit impatient. The quiet acceptance in his eyes blostered Sam's courage.

Sam spun another six or so rotations before coming to a stop. "Okay. So I have this friend. Let's call him Bob. Bob isn't like any other friend-- not like a guy who's just fun to hang out with. He's one of those friends who not only _says_ he would kill someone who tries to hurt me, he _means_ it too." He paused, glancing up to gauge the other man's expressoin. To his relief, it was one of polite interest rather than fear or revulsion. Sam continued, "So Bob and I, we've been through a lot of things together, seen some seriously scary shit, and mostly we've tried to watch each other's backs. But now that everything's calmed down again, a lot of things in my life had to change to make sure everyone I love stays safe. One of those things is having to take a....very long vacation from seeing my girlfriend, so I wanted to try to call her before she left. But my cellphone doesn't work down here....."

He trailed off, realizing he was rambling. "Anyway, that's only part of the reason I was looking for a phone. The main reason is that Bob had to leave again to do something uber dangerous, and I'm just so freaked that something's going to happen to him--" He broke off, hunching over in the chair and fisting his hands together behind his neck. He suddenly couldn't breathe properly. "He's probably the best thing that's ever happened to me, and he's out there all alone-- and he could get _killed_!" He curled even father into himself (--_alone, all alone, no one to help him-- Bee, no!--)._ "And the worst part is, I said something _awful_ to him before he left trying to keep him from leaving, but it didn't work and now he _hates my guts_!" He made a strange, hysterical little sobbing noise in his throat. "He might _die_ before I can tell him I'm sorry!"

Eyes screwed tightly shut, he never saw Orion scoot closer so that their chairs were touching. He jerked slightly when an arm came around his shoulders-- not pulling, not shaking, just holding him tightly, holding him together in a way he hadn't realized he needed. And suddenly he didn't care that it was a complete stranger, much less a guy, that was offering physical comfort. He soaked up the contact like a man in a desert would lap up fresh water, shuddering under the solid presence of Orion's arm.

"To top it all off--" He scrubbed a hand across his face, trying to regain some of his dignity. Though he pitched his tone to be slightly sarcastic, it came out trembling with shame and fear instead. "--When I tried to force Bob not to go, I ended up saying something that really hurt this wise, brave guy who's been trying to help me. Hell, he saved my life, and I was enough of a bastard to go and throw it all back in his face by waving around the thing he regrets most for everyone to see."

Sam shuddered, raking a hand through his hair. It was a mark of how upset he was that he didn't squirm away or offer any sort of protest as Orion drew him gently to him, tucking his head into the curve of his shoulder. His teenaged pride told him to buck away from the one-armed hug, throw off the slow cuddle. He told his teenaged pride to go leap off a bridge.

For a long moment they simply stayed that way, Sam basking in the feel of the fatherly contact from someone who _didn't_ want to see him die a horrible death, someone who _didn't_ think he was too vile to hug. Orion, for his part, didn't seem too eager to let go, either.

"It seems to me," the man said softly, chest rising and falling beneath Sam's ear as he breathed, "That if this...guy....is as wise as you say he is, he probably knew that you were trying to help your friend and has already forgiven you."

Sam snorted at that, pulling back from Orion. For a moment the arm around his shoulders tensed as if to keep him from leaning away, but then it released him without a fuss.

"Yeah. Right." Sam snorted caustically, clenching his hands between his knees. "Knowing my luck he won't even want to be in the same room with me again, much less look at me."

Reluctantly tearing his gaze from the flopping laces of his tennis shoes, he looked up to find Orion watching him with a kind of quiet intentness, blue eyes filled with so many things he could not name, though once again he got the impression that somewhere in there was sardonic amusement in response a hidden irony he had yet to stumble across. Looking into Orion's eyes, the flash of familiarity once more flooded through him, creeping along his spine with the whirling disorientation of a powerful dose of deja-vu. Sam couldn't suppress the overwhelming feeling that he _knew_ the man from somewhere.

"Were you ever a kindergarden teacher?" He blurted out a random speculation.

To his surprise, Orion threw back his head and laughed.

"No, thank heavens. Althought some days I feel like I am." With a sighing chuckle, he reached out and reclaimed his hat from the table, returning to spinning it in his hands.

Suddenly realizing that he had practically bawled all over a stranger, the tips of Sam's ears burned brightly pink. Enough bitching. Time to steer the conversation back onto more stable ground. Because even though he _could_ have simply gotten up, thanked the man, and left, he shied away from the mere thought. He _could_ leave, but he really didn't want to.

"So...what do you do around here?"

Orion leaned back into his chair, settling himself into the more relaxed air of the conversation. "Well, mostly I'm a strategist, but I do lead my own team out on the field sometimes. _Then_ it feels like I'm a real cowboy in need of a cattle prod!" He chuckled again.

Sam only slumped at the pronouncement. "Great. Now I feel totally useless."

"How so?" Orion raised a curious eyebrow in his direction, still twirling the hat in his hands.

Sam slumped even more deeply, crossing his arms over his chest. "I'm stuck here, and I can't do _anything_! Everyone's running around risking their lives to stop the Decepticons, and I'm just left sitting on my hands-- I can't do a lot of fancy stuff with computers, I can't coordinate air strikes, I can't use a gun-- heck, I probably don't even have the necessary qualifications to be a _janitor_!" He furiously mashed the heel of his hand into his eye. "I want to do something to be able to _help_ Bum-- my friends, but I'm just a worthless little human that probably couldn't even fight off another human threatening me a knife, much less beat back a Decepticon."

Eyes fixed on the hat in his hands, Orion asked, "Do you want to learn how to use a gun?"

"Oh, I don't know," Sam burst out, shrugging, "Yes, I guess. My friends probably wouldn't let me go out and help them, but at least if I could use a gun without shooting my foot off they wouldn't have to worry about hanging over my shoulder all the time to make sure the slightest little thing doesn't jump out of the closet and tear me to shreds." (--_and Bumblebee wouldn't resent protecting me so much if it wasn't a 24-7 job_--).

"I have something of a rep with Lennox. I'll talk to him and see what I can do about you learning to use a gun," Orion stated firmly.

Sam did a double-take at the steely promise, looking up in shock. "Why?" He blurted, "I mean, not just why would you help me get shooting lessons, but why all this--" he waved a hand at the room in general, the depth of the situation only just beginning to dawn on him, "--why let some random stranger spew all their garbage in your lap when you probably have better things to do?" (why hug me when even _I_ didn't know I needed it?). "Not that I'm complaining, but normal people don't just _do_ things like that for strangers."

"Well, Sam," Orion answered with an enigmatic grin, swiftly tucking his hat down over Sam's head and giving the brim a friendly tug, "Maybe because you looked you like could use a friend."

"Sir," a new voice interrupted them, startling Sam. He looked up to find Hound facing them, optics fixed on Orion (...sir?). "The power cells are almost depleted."

Orion sighed deeply, heaving himself from the chair. "Have you collected the data you needed, Hound?"

"Yes, sir. More than I had expected. This has proven to be a very useful test run."

"Good to hear," Orion replied, inclining his head. Then, he turned back to Sam with a smile.

"Rachet and I are in the infirmary. He's almost driven me nuts pestering me to get you down here to have that cut on your arm looked at. Why don't you come stop by and say hello?"

Sam could only gape at him, trying and failing to puzzle out the bizarre statement. What on earth was he talking about? He spoke almost as if he were in two places at once.

But before he could piece together a response to Orion's nonsensical words, the man did something he would never have imagined seeing anywhere but on a magician's stage. His body fizzled, as though interrupted by static-- and then he simply disappeared.

Sam cried out in shock, pushing back violently into his chair. The motion caused it to tip over, sending them both-- chair and pajama-clad human-- crashing to the floor.

"WHAT the FUCK?!" He shouted from his position on the floor, kicking out at the chair in an attempt to right himself. Without a doubt, he knew that things could not just simply disappear (not unless there was a space bridge involved). _Apples_ couldn't disappear, _dogs_ couldn't disappear, and _people_ most certainly couldn't disappear. But because he doubted Orion had the x-men worthy ability to turn both himself and his clothes invisible, he must have disappeared. Not only that, but a hand flailed around in the vicinity of his head revealed that even his hat-- his solid, undeniably real hat-- had vanished into the vast unknown with its owner.

"What the fuck?!" He repeated, scrambling painfully to his feet. Not an easy task when sporting a broken arm and tangled up with a swivel chair. "What was _that_?!" He shouted at an approaching Hound. "How did he do that?!"

"I thought you knew, Sam," the green Autobot told him with a touch of confusion, "I was informed that you had seen a few of our holograms before."

"Yeah, but when they were things like floors and stuff! Not....people...." He trailed off, because he HAD seen a hologram of a human before; Barricade had polished off his disguise with the addition of a sinister mustache man in the driver's seat. But there was a huge, glaring difference between the Decepticon hologram and Orion, a man he still half refused to believe had been nothing more than an illusion-- not only had mustache man remained as wooden and unmoving as a blow-up doll, he was far from solid. Orion hadn't just conjured a hat to put on his head-- _that_, he could grudgingly accept, might have been fake-- he had also shaken his hand, _grabbed his arm with enough force that Sam couldn't pull back_, and held him to his chest (a chest that had moved as he breathed and thudded with the drumming of a heartbeat). Sam would readily admit that he didn't know much about hologram technology, but he was pretty sure light warped into a specific shape couldn't mimic body heat or the weight of an arm across his shoulders. That was impossible.

"Are you telling me," he finally choked out, wheezing a little with a familiar constricting pain tightening around his chest (--_not there, never there_-- _of course no stranger would want to touch you--_), "That Orion wasn't real?"

"The hologram you saw wasn't real, yes." Oh God. Sam let his eyes slid shut, reaching out to brace himself on the table. "But Optimus Prime is very real."

"Optimus?" He looked up in confusion, "But what...."

Suddenly, all the signs coalesced in his mind. Blue jeans, red shirt-- red and blue armor. Blue eyes-- blue optics. Really tall. Battle scars._ 'Strategist...lead my own team...'_

"We have been creating a new species of hologram," Hound affirmed, "And Prime agreed to be my first test subject. It worked far better than we had expected, especially in regards to simulating solid matter."

But Sam couldn't care less about how well the experiment went. The bottom dropped out of his stomach and he groaned, "You mean I just spilled my guts to Optimus Prime?" Wait. "And he hugged me?!"

"It would seem that way, yes," the green Autobot informed him, sounding just a little bit smug, though his optics held a warm, friendly glint.

"...Perfect."

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

After his disasterous discovery of Hound's new hologram project, Sam had longed to slink back to his room and hide under the bed for a day or two, stewing in his own misery. But apparently that wasn't on the agenda any time soon with Rachet howling for his blood-- Hound gently but firmly herded him towards the infirmary, where the leader of all Cybertronians and a mad doctor awaited his arrival.

Hound, he soon discovered, was more than willing to chat him up along the way. Most of the time the Autobots had to be prodded into revealing any information-- and even then they were likely to come out with the most concise, scientifically accurate answer possible-- so the fact that he had stumbled across a robot that actually _liked_ to gossip was surprising, and refreshing.

...At least it _was_, until he discovered the green Autobot only really wanted to discuss his precious holograms.

"One of the largest problems we've encountered in traditional hologram use is the inability to project an image outside of a certain range or around a corner-- by their very nature, holograms follow a 'line of sight' path from whatever is projecting them, rendering them all but unusable in covert operations."

Sam nodded mutely as he plodded along behind Hound, mind wandering. During reasonable day light hours, such a topic would have fascinated him, maybe even dragged him into an intense technological discussion with Hound. But as most of his available processing power was going towards keeping himself upright, he could only catch every other word.

Hound didn't seem to notice or mind; he continued to ramble without Sam's input. "The only concievable way to solve the 'line of sight' problem is to create a remotely controlled transmitter that is connected to the Autobot deploying the hologram. Of course, it would be rather impractical to have a little black box on wheels zipping around wherever the hologram was needed, so I came up with a method of using microscopic nanomachines that could be self-propelled to project the image instead. Unfortunately, however, 90% of the mass of each nanomachine is taken up by the energy storage unit that provides it with power, leaving little space for projection equipment. As a result, each can only create a pinpoint of light, but a cloud of several billion working in conjunction is able to construct an entire image."

With only another teaspoon full of enthusiasm more, Hound would be bouncing and skipping down the hall rather than merely walking. From what Sam had so far been able to glean, the green Autobot was the equivalent of the hologram sensei for the alien visitors, possesing the most powerful projection capabilities of the group. Optimus came in a close second, thus the reason for using the alien leader as the guinea pig to test Hound's 'nanomachines'.

"Another advantage of using the nanomachines to create a hologram--" (oh yeah, definitely bouncing now), "--is the ability to simulate matter through the carefully controlled use of complex electrical charges. Heat, texture, weight-- all can be briefly replicated by twisting the interaction of the molecules at the atomic level through the use of such charges. Though," the green Autobot cycled air through his vents in a parody of a sigh, "There are several drawbacks I have not yet been able to find solutions for."

"Sounds good," Sam mumbled, scrubbing his face and squinting in the harsh light. Funny how he could feel wide awake while sitting in a swivel chair talking to a hologram and be seconds away from collapsing while walking. He really didn't want to see Optimus (though his emotions had become such a tangled jumble he was hard pressed to say why), and he absolutely _dreaded_ having to submit himself for inspection to Rachet. Wasn't there a _human_ doctor to look after human injuries?

"One of the biggest problems is the length of time 'solid' holograms can be used. Replicating a solid object drains enormous amounts of energy-- just shaking your hand robbed Prime of half his battery life-- which means that such a hologram can only exists for 17 to 18 minutes at the most, 25 if physical contact is kept to a minimum to reduce how long the nanomachines need to simulate things like pressure--"

Why did everything in the base have to be so far apart? Sam speculated that it was all a cosmic plot to make him have to walk as far as possible on only two hours of sleep and an empty stomach. If _he _were designing his own super-secret base, he would make the rooms rearrangable-- that way, the place he needed to get to would always be right next door to wherever he was at the moment.

"--another problem we've encountered is the low retrieval rate for the nanomachines themselves. Their size and complexity almost guarantees that some precentage will simply stop working, and others are lost in transit when being recalled to the host transformer. Optimus lost about .19% of his nanomachines while speaking with you, a number that is far too high for any degree of efficiency--"

"Wait," Sam blinked, catching onto the tail end of Hound's rambling tangent, "He lost them? Where'd they go?"

The green Autobot turned to look back at him briefly, optics whirling in a manner he had come to associate with being scanned.

"A few are still floating around in the air in the experiment room, but the majority have remained attached to you."

"Ack!" Sam skidded to a halt, brushing frantically at his hair and clothes, "Where?!"

But then he happened to turn his good hand-- the one he had used to shake hands with Orion-- a certain way, and a silvery dusting on his wrist and the palm caught the light with a faint shimmer. He stared at the coated flesh in fascination and revulsion, twisting his arm this way and that to find the edges of the silver glimmer. It wasn't noticable without the light touching it at a certain angle, and even then it could have been mistaken for a fine sheen of sweat.

Backtracking at Sam's exclaimation, Hound crouched low over his shoulder to examine the human hand for himself.

"No need to worry," he soothed, "Even carrying a full charge the are harmless, and now that their powercells have been depleted they are no more than powdered metal. Dust."

Sam brushed his hand on his pants, looked at it again, then brushed more vigorously. The silver sheen remained. "It doesn't act like dust-- it's not coming off!"

"It will eventually. The nanomachines aren't smooth like grains of sand-- they have many barbs along the outside surface, similiar to sea urchins, that can hook into the upper layer of skin and prevent easy removal. But nonetheless, when your body sheds that surface layer of skin they'll come off." He stood, motioning for Sam to follow. "Come on. We're almost there. I've already had to shut down one of my internal communication channels to block out Rachet."

With a resigned sigh (and one last stubborn scrub at the palm of his hand), Sam started after the green Autobot. "What was he bitching at _you_ for?"

"Letting you walk," Hound grunted.

Frustrated ire began to rise in his chest, uncoiling like a snake with a warning rattle of its tale. "'_Letting_ me walk?' I'm not a china doll-- I don't need to be carried! I've slogged my way through 18 years of life on my own two feet without needing to be carried (well, okay, minus those times riding in a car, but those don't really count), and I don't plan to start now."

"Relax!" Hound held up his hands to ward off a continuation of his tirade, "You don't see me agreeing with Rachet, do you? I wouldn't be on his shitlist right now if I did."

Sam deflated. "Oh. I guess not. But still," he ground on mulishly, but without his former heat, "You'd think making it through Mission city, killing Megatron, finding the matrix in the middle of the desert, and running back through a virtual shooting gallery to revive Optimus would convince him that I'm capable of looking after myself."

"What _I_ think," Hound answered mysteriously, not looking back, "Is that after watching you make it through Mission city, kill Megatron, find the Matrix in the middle of the desert, and run back through a virtual shooting gallery to revive Optimus, Rachet doesn't want you to _need_ to capable of looking after yourself. He can be a regular mother hen that way."

Before Sam had time to wrap his mind around the cryptic message in Hound's words, the green Autobot stopped outside a set of roll away double doors that would not have looked out of place attached to one of the airplane hangers on the surface. They were closed when the pair arrived, but at some unspoken signal from the hologram guru they split apart and winched themselves open, gliding without even the faintest squeak of protesting gears.

Peering into the vast room beyond-- expansive in terms of floor space, but not as lofty as the command center-- Sam realized that what he had already seen of the base was so far from alien that it might have been mass produced by Mcdonald's. Here, in a room designed specifically for Cybertronians, the true nature of the robotic visitors at last came to light. 'Alien' was the only way he could possibly describe it-- so far from what he had ever seen or imagined that it was almost beyond comprehension.

Long, twisting things that could have been vines or tentacles or metal tubes slithered like so many fat worms up the walls and over the ceiling, turning the room into a sloping cave. Looking down, he saw they continued across the floor as well, though unlike the ones covering the walls those under his feet had flattened out into an undulating mosaic to create a level walking surface. Strange devices and machines parted the mass like a curtain, rising up out of the floor, walls and ceiling in unrecognizable shapes. Here was a cluster of something that looked like a cross between several mechanical arms and a jack port the size of a dinner plate-- similar sets of appendages descended from various parts of the randomly sloped ceiling, though _these_ ended in many-bladed knives and needle-sharp points and wickedly curved hooks that bent in every imaginable direction. Beneath each motionless metal spider sprouted a Stephen King version of a dentist's chair, each large enough to hold a Cybertronian. They possesed no padding to speak of, and in fact there were dozens of things that he guessed were jacks or plugs jutting from the surface like so many daggers. Some part of his mind registered that they were super-efficient versions of the operating table-- they were separated into segmented parts for each limb that could be raised, lowered, and tilted at exactly the right angle. And though he knew, intellecutally, that the knife-legged spiders and the chairs were meant to heal rather than hurt, he couldn't help but cringe away from them.

Looking through the safe, normal, human doorway at the alien lair beyond-- a lair of wires that looked like veins and sewer-stain bluish-green instruments of torture-- the fact that he now _belonged_ to the creatures that lived there-- creatures that were in no way human for all their human mimicry-- slammed into him with the force of a Mac truck.

And suddenly, Sam was afraid.

But he never had the chance to act on his instinct to jack-rabbit, for the next instant Hound picked him up (causing Sam to flinch violently, heart trying to tear itself from his chest) and stepped through the doorway. The hanger door closed behind them automatically with a rolling hiss, sealing them inside.

Trying to breathe evenly (and trying not to look at all the wickedly sharp implements dangling motionlessly from the ceiling) he scanned the 'infirmary' for Optimus and Rachet. A bulging machine kept them from being visible from the door, but a few steps into the room Sam spotted them near the back wall. At the sight of the red and blue alien leader lying motionless in one of the chairs-- his colorful form and angular planes a vibrant counterpoint to the organic nature of the room-- a thrill of fear shot down his spine. His worry was only exacerbated by the presence of Rachet, who was engaged in leaning over the other alien and tinkering with something in his side. He remembered Sideswipe telling him that Optimus had ingored his own injuries to ride the aircraft carrier with him back to India. Had using the complex hologram drained his energy somehow? Had it stressed something not meant to be stressed?

"Here he is, Rachet," Hound announced in an exasperated tone, offering the human dangling from his clasped hands to the medic, "Safe and sound, just like I promised."

Rachet retracted his spindly fingers from Optimus and turned towards them, but at the moment Sam couldn't tear his gaze from Optimus' shuttered optics.

"Optimus?" He whispered (well, okay, squeaked).

In response to his frightened call, the shutters immediately spiraled open and his optics flared with a brilliant blue glow, gaze roving to the side to fix on the human. It was hard to think of Optimus as being quite so alien when looking into his very human-yet-not eyes. Maybe because they were filled with life, intelligence and emotion rather than the mindless instinct to lay eggs in people's chests (--_definitely need to lay off the cheesy alien movies, Sam_--). Something inside of him unclenched beneath that gaze. It made him feel...safe.

"What's wrong with him? Is he okay?" He demanded of Rachet.

But it was Optimus, instead, who spoke. "I'm fine, Sam. There is no need for you to worry."

"Perhaps you are 'fine' now," Rachet growled, reaching for Sam, "But it was foolish to agree to test an unknown piece of technology before I had finished attending to all your wounds. I hope you will not forget that you came dangerously close to permanently deactivating."

Sam flinched as the medic's spindly fingers plucked him gingerly from Hound's grasp and carried him to something resembling a flat workbench near where Optimus lay. He looked towards the alien leader as a series of metallic clicks and hisses-- like the sound of plugs disengaging-- arose in his direction. Without the slightest hitch in his movements, without any sign of strain, Optimus slowly sat up and swung his legs down from the chair, a myriad of wires and tubes (some no thicker than a hair) pulling free and retracting as he went.

Behind them, Hound twittered something in Cybertronian, recieving a curt response from Rachet and an agreeable rumble from Optimus. Sam twisted around to look back at the green Autobot as the spindly fingers set him gently on the workbench. Hound gave him another goofy salute, then ducked into a bow the way Jolt and Sideswipe had before. There was no doubt this time-- the Autobot was bowing to _him_.

"I'll see you later, Sam. If Rachet ever lets you out of his claws, that is."

Rachet hissed something that sounded quite foul over his shoulder, and with a reel of clicks and whistles that sounded suspiciously like laughter, Hound turned and left the infirmary. The door slid closed once more behind him.

Sam twisted back around to face Rachet, pasting on a bright smile. Maybe he could head the medic off at the pass. "Look....I know you want to do the whole doctor thing, I get that. But I really am fine, see? Well, maybe except for the broken arm part, but you already knew about that. So it was nice seeing you guys, but I think I'll just head back to my room now-- hey!"

Ignoring his rambling assurances, Rachet split apart the fingers of one hand into a dozen razor thin implements, using them to gingerly grasp the sleeve of his hoody and pull it up past his elbow, exposing the toilet paper bandage. With a single precise motion, one of the finger splinters sliced through the wrappings and pulled them away from his arm, unveiling the sticky, clotted mess the cut had become. Eew.

"This isn't that big of a deal! I mean, yeah, I cut myself, but I'm not bleeding like a stuck pig or anything! I'm sure whatever you were fixing on Optimus is _way_ more important."

He tried to pull back, secretly terrified of those many jointed alien fingers, but Rachet's other hand came around behind his back and held him in place with strength a thousand times that of flesh and bone. Optimus slowly apporached the workbench, watching him over the medic's shoulder.

"Rachet finished the necessary repairs just as you walked in, Sam." The alien leader refuted his argument, voice holding a strangely calming tone.

"It is a moot point, regardless," Rachet said, bringing his head closer to the line of gore marring his arm, the intricate pieces forming his unique optics whirling ceaselessly, "And even though you are not bleeding 'like a stuck pig', leaving something like this unattended could still result in an uncontrolled growth of malignant bacteria."

Sam blanched. "W-what?"

"An infection."

"Oh," He cringed back again as Rachet's fingers began to transform once more, "But seriously, I can go get a human doctor to give me some Neosporin--"

"Sam," Optimus interrupted him, "Have you wondered why it is my soldiers have adopted the habit of bowing to you before they leave the room?"

The question came so far out of left field that it threw him completely off-balance-- he craned his neck to look up at the towering alien, frowing deeply. He _had_ wondered, though he hadn't dared to bring it up, just in case asking made him look like a megalomaniac who thought people _should_ bow to him and who interpreted an unrelated alien greeting as such to satisfy his mania.

"Yeah..." he answered slowly, then jumped as something cold and wet touched his arm-- he glanced down to find Rachet smearing a thick liquid the color of syrup down the cut, painlessly pulling away the black scabs. Now that he was able to look at it more closely, he could see that the edges of the skin didn't meet each other in the middle. Ugh. He needed stitches. Great.

"Sam," Optimus drew his attention away again (--_he's trying to distract me!_--), "I don't know how much Bumblebee may or may not have told you about our culture, but you should be aware that during the Golden Age-- a time before the Decepticons seized control and war consumed our planet-- religion was wide spread among our people."

He had to give Optimus credit-- he certainly knew how to ensnare someone's attention. Something sharp pricked his arm. He winced, glancing down to find three of Rachet's spidery fingers rapidly pulling a long thread so thin it was almost transparent through his flesh, sewing the two halves of the cut together at a mind-boggling pace. The liquid must have contained a numbing agent-- he felt almost nothing save for the occasional prick and a steady pulling sensation.

But as much as good sense told him to keep his eye on the medic to insure he didn't do something sneaky, alien, and invasive, he found his attention drawn back to Optimus like a nail attracted to a magnet.

"I didn't know robots could be spiritual--" Way to be insulting, dimwit. "--I mean, don't you guys run on logic and stuff?" He blamed his stumbling brilliance on a severe lack of sleep; it was hard to remember to be diplomatic at 3am.

"While we may be robots, Sam, we are nothing like human made robots. The difference between us is that we are _alive._" Optimus explained, luckily not seeming to be insulted. "And like all living creatures, we seek to discover the meaning behind our existence. In many way, our creation story is very much like yours, though it does not start with 'In the beginning there was the Word.'"

"Similar? How?"

"Our ancestors spoke of a benevolent, omniscient being called Primus that existed before all else and created the universe to end the terrible agony of being alone. They said that Primus created thirteen powerful beings to carry out His will, beings that were supposedly perfect in every way."

Sam's mouth went dry, thinking of what he had learned those few times he had attended Bible school. "Except they weren't," he whispered, enthralled.

"No," the alien's tone turned dark, foreboding, "One of them, the being named Unicron, did not wish to be a servant. It wished to be a god to rival Primus, and so it turned on its creator with the intent to destroy Him. But evil could not vanquish good, and Unicron's efforts failed, casting it into everlasting darkness."

"A baseless fairy tale," Rachet scoffed, finishing with his needle work and severing the end of the thread, "If there truly _were_ a benevolent Creator, I would not have to watch so many sparks fade away in agony." His voice dropped as he turned away, hand returning to its original state. "And I would rather be cast myself into the Pit than bow before any Creator that saw fit to curse us with this war."

Sam looked up to find Optimus watching the medic sadly, his own heart twisting as he realized all the horrors Rachet must have seen on the battle field. And he wondered just how many Rachet had been forced to kill from mercy rather than leave to perish slowly in agony.

"I guess....most of you guys don't really believe anymore," he said lowly. Optimus returned his luminous gaze to him.

"Some of us do." And the alien tapped gently on the side of his own head, tracing the delicate symbols etched into the metal armor.

Sam leaned forward slightly, narrowing his eyes at the twining runes. "What are those?"

To his surprise, Optimus chuckled. "Even the most logical of us sometimes fall to superstition. They are ancient prayers to Primus. For protection--" A curling wave over the sheath from which his battle mask would emerge. "For strength--" A claw-like symbol stamped into the apex of his shoulder armor. "For wisdom--" A rune that resembled spread wings on the left sensor fin framing his head. "For faith--" An intricate swirl near the place that, on humans, would be his cheek bone.

"You believe?" Sam asked in awe, for the first time taking stock of the dozens of symbols scattered across his body. At Optimus' explanations they took on new meaning-- they weren't merely alien words, they were religious battle tattoos.

"Yes."

"So....they bow to me because of something to do with religion?"

While they spoke, Rachet had gathered a length of gauzy material from somewhere in the room. He strode back to them with it dangling between his hands, not even glancing at Optimus as he brushed past him in his bee-line for Sam.

"Honor was an integral part of the old Code of Primus," the medic responded, cutting off anything Optimus might have said, "The bond created through the invocation of a life debt was perhaps the most binding of any intangible bond, simply because of the duty of honor laid upon the one whose life had been saved."

"Optimus already explained about the 'thrice-indebted' thing," Sam replied, equal parts confused and embarassed. He didn't like to think of himself as having anyone in his debt.

"You are forgetting the most salient point." Rachet coated the stitched cut with a sealer of some kind, then began to carefully wrap the length of material around his arm. --A bandage, he realized. He had expected something unfathomably alien. "You do not have just _any_ Cybertronian in your debt-- by his own admission three times over, I might add-- you have a _Prime_ in your debt, the last Prime, the leader of our people. As such, the debt of honor extends not only to Optimus himself, but to all those who place themselves under his command."

"And remember," Optimus added softly, "Though many have ceased to believe in Primus, all still cling to memories of our culture, of our home. They bow to you not only to honor what you have done, but to keep the spirit of our people alive."

Feeling unexpectedly small and ugly, Sam curled into himself a little, fidgeting with his new bandage (better than toilet paper by a long shot) until Rachet gently slapped his hand away. He didn't _want_ to be a symbol of hope for an alien race-- he wanted to be _Sam_. Even if he had to try to be Sam while living in a top secret military base in India, he would have much preferred for everyone to mostly ignore him. Much less chance of not living up to their expectations that way. Besides, he really didn't feel like a hero worthy of much of anything. The real heroes were the ones that didn't come back (--_a single shot, just a single shot-- BOOM-- her head's gone, oh God, her head's gone_--).

"Whatever," he muttered, ears burning. So tired that he had begun to shake, all he really wanted to do was crawl into bed, pull the covers over his head and wait until the world stopped flipping upside down all the time. But he didn't think he'd be able to sleep until he could call Bumblebee and make sure he was alive--

"Wait!" he cried, head snapping up. "Optimus, can you use your internal radio or something to get in contact with Bumblebee?"

"Ah yes, your quest for a phone," he replied with a touch of amusement. "I apologize for misleading you with my hologram, Sam, though in my defense I never once lied. Not even about my name."

Sam waved it away. He still didn't really know how he felt about having vented his spleen to Optimus without realizing it, much less what to do with the fact that he had been hugged by a hologram (--_hugged by Optimus_--). Maybe he'd feel angry in the morning. Maybe he'd feel relieved to have gotten all that off his chest. But at the moment he only felt like a rubber band being pulled in six different directions at once, the only thing ceaselessly dominating his thoughts being the need to try to protect his friend, even if protecting him only amounted to badgering him over the phone. Pissed or not, Bumblebee was still his best friend. The robot would simply have to suck it up and deal with it. No matter what, Sam wasn't going to risk losing him on a sour note the way Jolt had lost Arcee (--_a wail of unfiltered agony, the bare anguish of the soul_--).

"Can you do it, though? Contact Bumblebee?"

Rachet turned his optics to Optimus; Optimus shifted uneasily.

"Yes. I maintain an open channel to each of my soldiers at all times," he tapped one of the blue fins sprouting from the sides of his head, "It is customary, while on missions, to broadcast a continuous feedback loop-- a signal indicating that nothing is amiss-- to someone on base, and to send detailed status reports every 2.3 seconds."

"Great!" He tried to smile, tried to block the way nervousness rippled from the alien leader from his mind. There couldn't be anything wrong. There couldn't be. "So, could you send him a short message from me?"

Rachet shifted closer to him, not speaking.

Optimus hesitated, clicking to himself. "Yes," he answered at last, "It would be a simple matter to do such a thing."

Sam started to relax, then realized that Optimus had never actually said he was _going _to_._

"'Would'? Does that mean you can't-- or won't? W-why not?"

Rachet took another step forward until he was not quite hovering over him. "Sam. I must insist that you calm yourself--"

"I AM calm!" He erupted. He sucked in air through his nose, trying to settle his racing heart, but if nothing were wrong Optimus would have _said_ so, Optimus would have told him if Bumblebee were hurt, if Bumblebee were dying, if Bumblebee were dead-- he wouldn't just keep standing there-- keep standing there-- keep standing there--

"What's happened?" Sam asked, forcing himself not to shout, not to jump up in a panic. To his credit, his voice came out fairly steady.

But Optimus was hesitating again. "Nothing--" (LIAR!) "--you should probably try to get some sleep, Sam. I left a message with Ironhide to pass onto Captain Lennox first thing in the morning. He'll be expecting you at 8--"

"What. Happened." (--_oh God no, please no, pleasepleaseplease_--)

Sam met Optimus' heavy blue gaze without blinking, without backing down, though on the inside something had started to scream---

"Precisely as I have said, Sam," he answered softly, "Nothing. No feedback loop, no status report. We lost contact with Bumblebee approximately 43 minutes ago."

Sam felt as though he were choking. "You mean," he gasped out, "that Bumblebee c-could have been KILLED while I was just sitting there talking to you, just sitting, just-- just--" Then another thought occured to him, one so powerful that he found himself leaping to his feet in rage. "You just sat there finishing some goddamn EXPERIMENT while Bumblebee might have been fighting for his _LIFE_! He could be _dying_ RIGHT NOW, and none of you thought it would be a good idea to try to go HELP him?! What the hell is WRONG with you?!"

"Control yourself, Samuel, or I will be forced to sedate you," Rachet informed him coldly. Sam ignored him and moved to the edge of the workbench, trying to hide the way his limbs shook like branches buffeted in a high wind.

"Well if you people aren't going to go help him, I AM. I've got some money-- I'm going to get the biggest damn gun I can find, buy a plane ticket to Nigeria, and blow that mirage to kingdom come!" He didn't feel any calmer, not by a long shot. But he had a goal now-- a drive, a purpose. It sharpened his mind to a razor's edge, allowing him to chain down his hysteria.

"Sam," Optimus called his name softly.

Sam ignored him.

"Sam."

He sat down on the edge of the table and swung his legs over the side. It wasn't that far to the floor-- maybe only about eight or nine feet. If he remembered to bend his knees slightly and roll forward with the impact--

"STOP."

I'm not one of your soldiers, Optimus. (A good thing too-- you can't send me out and leave me, send me out to die--). I'm human. I have free will. Telling me to stop isn't going to make me. I have to save Bumblebee. I have to save Bumblebee. I have to save--

A hand whipped out and caught him just as he dropped over the side of the table. Optimus. Rather than replace him on the workbench or set him on the floor, the alien used his other hand to curl him into a ball against his chest, effectly cutting off all resistance.

"Stop."

Sam shuddered, feeling all the energy drain from him. Damn subconcious instincts. They had no right to tell him to relax when forced into the fetal position. He had to DO something-- He had to-- he had to...

"You must believe me, Sam," Optimus whispered to him with quiet insistence as his struggles finally ceased, "I have two very good reasons to believe that Bumblebee is neither dead nor in immediate danger. For the first you will simply have to trust me, as it is something I cannot yet tell you. For the second, it is logical that Bumblebee would abruptly shut down his communications if he came within striking distance of our mirage-- keeping an open channel would be tantamount to broadcasting his presence, which would either force his target to flee or put him into even greater danger. I know you hate to hear this, but at the moment no news is good news."

"Or really, REALLY bad news," he mumbled, mortified to hear his voice emerge as a whimper. Sam knew Optimus could hear him; after all, he had heard him outside the door to the experiment room and changed the code to allow him in. But the alien chose not to respond to his pessimistic grumble, only holding him silently between his hands, seeming to wait-- as Sam himself did-- for his heartbeat to slow. Surprisingly enough, he wasn't uncomfortable in the alien's grip, but it _was_ rather strange to have to cross his eyes to look at the metal so close to the end of his nose. Some part of him tried to be afraid at the thought of how easily those robotic hands-- hands that had crushed concrete and bent steel, chewing open a car like thinly stretched plastic-- could snap his spine in his curled position, but long-buried instinct reacted to being warm and enclosed, forcing him to calm, to not be afraid.

At long last, Optimus said, "If I put you down, will you refrain from hijacking the first plane you can find?"

It was hard to imagine someone so serious making a joke, particuarly in such a grave tone of voice, but it suddenly dawned on Sam that Optimus _was_ making a joke. Who knew robots could have a dry sense of humor.

"Yes." Pause. "But I'm not making any promises about the gun."

Apparently Optimus knew enough about human nature to realize that he, too, was joking (mostly), and eased the pressure on Sam's back, opening the clam shell of his hands. But rather than lower Sam on the floor, he set the human on his feet back on the workbench. Okay, so maybe Optimus didn't _entirely_ trust him not to run off and do something spur-of-the-moment.

"You might choose to wait until _after _you have been given some instruction in their use before making off with a gun. I'm certain Rachet wouldn't appreciate having to patch you up if you 'shot your foot off'."

"I could always save him the trouble by going to a _human_ doctor," Sam muttered petulantly. (--_Bee, please be safe_....).

"No," Rachet responded with surprising vehmence. "Whether or not you are amenable to the fact is irrelevant. You are our ward, and thus you are under my care. I will not hand you over to those meat butchers."

Sam grimaced at the slurr against the medical profession, and sniped back, "They would have done they same thing you did, you know-- sewn me up and put a bandage on."

"If I had access to half of the materials I currently need, I could have healed your laceration without the need to resort to something as primitive as 'sewing you up' in the first place!"

"I think this is a debate best left for another time," Optimus interjected, "Sam needs to sleep before his lesson tomorrow at 8am."

"8am?" Sam gasped in horror, glancing at his watch, "That's like....in four hours!"

"It would not have been a problem if you had not decided to roam the halls while you should have been sleeping," Rachet informed in, tone matter-of-fact rather than snotty, as it could have been.

"I couldn't sleep," Sam defended himself, "So I decided that I might as well try to check up on Mikaela and Bumblebee. But then my phone wouldn't work down here..."

Rachet leaned in to his personal space, scrutinizing his profile. "Why could you not sleep?"

"The usual things. Stress. Nightmares," he sighed, passing a hand over his head and rubbing the back of his neck. His fear for Bumblebee threatened to bubble to the surface once more, but he beat it back down with the knowledge that he did, despite everything, trust Optimus. And Optimus said that Bumblebee wasn't in danger-- for the moment, at least. The monster that had taken up residence in his chest sat on its haunches, but it did not lie back down again. "I don't know if you guys dream or not, but from a human prospective it's pretty hard to sleep while watching a horror movie where everyone you love dies-- repeatedly-- playing on the insides of your eyelids. Though..." he paused, dragging up a misty remnant of a memory, "There were some things in there that weren't nightmares, but they were still pretty strange. Strange, as in _not_ strange, not dream-like."

Optimus' gaze seemed to sharpen, and even Rachet stiffened in his peripheral vision. "What do you mean?" Optimus probed.

Sam could only shrug, not seeing a reason for their sudden tension. And he was too exhausted from his emotional rollercoaster to really care anyway. As long as Bee wasn't in trouble, they could be nervous about anything they wanted and he wouldn't give a hoot.

"Well....every one of them focused on Bumblebee, though he didn't really seem to be doing much besides driving. But no one was ever with him, not even me, and the places he was driving through weren't familiar-- one of them was a jungle, another was the city of filthy tin-roof slums, and I think one had a bunch of donkeys in it....."

Rachet stared at him for a long moment, then turned slowly to Optimus and warbled something in dial tone. A question.

"It is not our place to interfere," Optimus answered softly in english.

Sam could only look between them in confusion, not having the faintest idea of what was going on. Then he decided he was really too tired to care; his legs ached from standing for so long, so he sat down. Bowing his head, he massaged his temples to try to ease away some of the sparking pain beginning to gather between them. God, he just wanted to sleep.

"Could someone _please_ put me down on the floor," he interruped their silent, internal argument, "I don't have much time left before eight, and I might not be able to fall asleep, but I would really like to go back to my room and at least _try _to sleep."

Head in his hands, he never saw Rachet move until he felt a prick in his neck and heard the ominous snap-hiss of hypo being emptied.

"Shit!" He jerked away, pulling his head in like a turtle to protect his neck, "What is it with you and stabbing people?!"

Already he had begun to feel woozy-- exhaustion sped up the effects of the drug, making his head feel like it was floating up off his shoulders.

"You claimed that you were experiencing difficulty falling asleep. It follows that the use of a tranquilizer would be perfectly acceptable to remedy the situation."

"Tranquilize....yo mamma...."

Slowly losing control over his muscles, he sagged sideways-- and into Optimus' hand, conveniently placed to intercept him. Everything rapidly darkened to a twilight gray, then to black as his eyes slid closed. Vaguely he was aware of being lifted up and of two voices speaking above his head in Cybertronian.

Yet floating somewhere between awake and asleep, the noises he heard strangely began to make sense. They still sounded like bleeps and whirls, clicks and warbles, but somehow those robotic sounds were as familiar to him as his own skin, no longer a mystery. He couldn't follow the conversation, not really, but he could certainly listen. So listen he did.

::So. It is as you feared, then::

::Yes. These things can be very difficult to judge, and I had hoped that the anomoly I detected was simply a random blip of data, but now there can be no doubt:::

::Does Bumblebee know?::

::Yes. I informed him of the possibility as soon as possible after the incident. He did not take it well::

::Bumblebee is afraid::

::And so is the human, though he does not yet conciously understand what has happened. What is continuing to happen::

::A progression? Is that even possible?::

::At this stage he should sense little to nothing, and yet-- as we have both heard-- that is not the case::

::Emotional amplification?::

::Without a doubt::

::What would you suggest?::

::There is nothing that can be done. An attempt in either direction could be disasterous::

::Waiting is not an option either::

::....You fear what the human will do if he discovers what has happened?::

::No. I fear what _Bumblebee_ might do. You know his feelings as well as I::

::Regardless, he would be reluctant to attempt anything that might harm the human::

::...If he becomes desperate enough, he just might...::

....................

......Darkness..........

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Agent Johnathan Grieves loved his job. Only 25, and already he had made it to the big time-- NEST wasn't quite Area 51, but it still had aliens. Lots of aliens. And surprisingly enough, they were neither little green men nor had designs to conquer the world.

Well, the _good_ aliens didn't, at least.

Most of the time he only interacted with those good aliens, so about sixty of the seventy hours he put in a week seemed more like a dream come true than veritable slavery. The other ten hours weren't so much fun, because then he had to deal with the bad aliens.

The Decepticons.

Funny how things like intergalactic translations worked. Deception: something that deceives or is intended to deceive; fraud; artifice. Deceiver: someone who misleads or falsely presuades others; trickster; also see: Satan. At first glance, the name 'Decepticon' seemed almost laughable, childish. But considering that the creatures they were fighting might as well have been the Devil incarnate, its use made a lot of sense. More than he wanted it to.

Which was why, at the moment, he almost wished he could be anywhere else than standing guard at the rear exit of an Indian hotel, a rather upscale one at that. The plush carpet beneath his feet could have been genuine Persian, the walls were freshly painted a muted gold, and the air didn't reek of garbage and car exhaust as many other places in the crowded city did. But all the luxuries in the world couldn't put him at ease, not with a cutting-edge headset nestled into his ear, a loaded Magnum beneath his jacket, and a discreet radiation scanner in his hand. Because at the moment, Johnathan Grieves was doing the one thing that terrified the shit out of him about his job-- he was on the lookout for Decepticons. Three floors above him, the girl he had been charged with protecting was still asleep in her room, guarded by three agents actually within the room, two outside the door, one at each end of the hall on every floor, and twelve rotating around the perimeter of the building. A married couple were also housed above him in the room beside the girl's, protected by their own platoon of armed agents.

There would not have been a need for so many agents if the three civilians weren't important. Really important. And wherever there was something very important to the Autobots, the Decepticons were never far away.

He strode slowly down the hallway, sweeping the scanner in a wide arc from left to right as he went. When he reached the elevator he stopped and turned, making his way back down the hall towards the rear exit. So far not one of the agents had registered anything, not even a blip. It made him uneasy.

::Agent 9, come in. Report your status::

"Agent 9 checking in, all quiet on the western front."

The lead agent didn't appreciate his subtle attempt at humor, ignoring him in favor of moving on down the list of agents and assesing their status in turn. Every agent went through the entire proceedure about once every seven minutes, and after a while-- when nothing started blowing up and their scanners didn't start going haywire-- it grew boring and repetitive. Like watching windshield wipers on a rainy day.

Down to the end of the hallway, stop for a visual check through the glass door, turn and march back towards the elevators. The geiger count hugged zero. Still nothing. That should have relieved him, but it only served to crank up his anxiety another notch. Though there was no basis for the feeling, he couldn't shrug the conviction that he was being watched-- that a pair of red eyes lingered in the shadows, targeting his heart through the gray material covering his back. He had seen what happened to the other agents caught unawares by a Decepticon; it was never a pretty sight.

Stop at the elevator, wave the scanner back and forth (still nothing), twist around and start back towards the door again.

::Agent 9, Status check::

"Agent 9, checking in. All clear on first level."

The sense that he was being secretly observed increased with every step, causing his heart to hammer wildly beneath the solid weight of the Magnum. By the time he reached the glass paneled door again, he was convinced that if he leaned forward and glanced around into the parking lot, he would find something too hideous, too terrible to describe waiting for him just around the corner.

But he was a NEST agent. It was his job to fight Decepticons, damnit. No matter how much he wanted to run as fast as possible in the other direction, he had to look, he had to protect the girl he had been assigned to protect.

So he stepped forward and peered through the glass at the parking lot. Nothing.

But suddenly his scanner blipped in his hand. Still caught in the grips of the icy conviction that there was something out there, he gazed in fear at the instrument in his hands. The needle twitched up the scale, coming near the base line mark for the smallest of transformers, and settled again. He stared at it intently, convinced that if he looked away it would swell into the red zone. Nothing. The needle clung to the bottom edge, seemingly made of lead.

Feeling the hairs prickling on the back of his neck again, he looked once more out the window. His gaze focused on the spaces between the cars, the dark slots beneath the cars, the row of wilted hedges framing the parking lot, even the alleys between the buildings across the street. Unless there was a Decepticon the size of a fly out there, nothing was looking through the window at him.

And yet he knew with every ounce of gut-clenching, spine-tingling instinct that _something_, somehow, was watching him. Gathering the frail dregs of his courage about him, he sucked in a deep breath and leaned on the bar to open the door.

A gust of surprisingly cool wind buffeted his face. The scent of ozone hung in the air, and the dawn twilight was far darker than it should have been at almost 7am in the morning. The rainy season should still have been about a month away, and yet unless he was in the grips of a hallucination it looked as though it would start flooding at any minute.

Sticking his head out into the charged air, he glanced around both corners of the building, one hand reaching beneath his jacket for the Magnum. He still felt observed, though his eyes and his scanner told him that he was only imagining things. Slowly easing his hand away from his weapon, he threw once last glance around the misty parking lot and angled his eyes towards the sky. The billowing gray mass of clouds overhead had not yet enveloped the whole of the sky, but it loomed large and threatening above the buildings, looking for all the world like the leading wave of a tsunami moving in slow motion. No Decepticons up in the sky, either. Not that he had been expecting Starscream to pop in for a visit, especially since the last report had stated that the malevolent jet still needed to reattach his arm, but it didn't hurt to be cautious.

He pulled his head back inside and locked the door with a special key he had been given by management. The feeling of being stared at by something with evil intentions slowly faded, but he couldn't put this issue from his mind as no more than mild panic attack, especially considering the momentary spike that had registered on the scanner.

Johnathan suspected that he should inform the lead agent of the storm and suggest moving the three civilians to an ealier flight so they wouldn't end up stuck in India when the monsoon finally hit. He knew he should, but something he could not name held him back.

::Agent 9, Status Check::

He hesitated. His gut instincts as an agent warned him that if something _had_ been watching-- if something were _still_ watching, waiting for them to give it an opening to attack-- it would be disasterous to announce his plans to get the three packages out sooner over the radio where a Decepticon with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment could easily pick it up. Secrecy would be the key to preventing the Decepticons from getting the upper edge.

::Agent 9, Status Check. Do you copy::

"Copy that, Agent 0. It's still quiet down here."

Johnathan knew he might get himself fired for lying to a superior officer, especially when engaged in a high priority mission. But if doing so would save the three people in his care, he was willing to risk it. Casually pulling out a pen and a small notebook from his jacket pocket, he scribbled out a note in code that would inform Agent 0 not only of what he had seen and felt, but also of his hunch that an earlier departure time would not be a bad idea.

When the next agent came to take his place two hours later, he silently pressed the note into Agent 0's hand as he passed the man on the way up the stairs to the third floor.

It was out of his hands now. He could only hope to God that it would work. It would really ruin his day to be dismembered by a Decepticon pissed at being thwarted by a human. Not to mention, it would prove his friends right when they said he was suicidal for wanting a job working with aliens. He _liked_ working with aliens, possibility of a gruesome death and all.

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Deep beneath the Indian bedrock, spiraling out under the ocean floor, the NEST mainframe PSAI, or Partially Sentient Artificial Intelligence, ceaselessly processed trillions of gigabytes of data per minute, cycling through every electronic medium it could access for any hint of Decepticon activity.

The PSAI mainframe, despite its clumsy acronym, had no conciousness to speak of. It could see, hear, and communicate intelligently, but it possesed no self, either to be content with its work or to be driven insane by it, or even to feel depressed about its life as a faceless machine hardwired into the very walls.

But it could, to some extent, be afraid.

When its signal lights would begin to flash and its alarms begin to wail to indicate an ongoing Decepticon attack, it presented a picture far more alive that its usual facade of mechanical indifference. Of course it never _truly_ felt fear when ringing its alarms and winking its red lights on and off, but all watching humans would have sworn up and down that it looked like it was flying into a panic.

Yet even machines could, at times, be overwhelmed by facts and numbers spinning through their program drives and logic engines. And at approximately 9:23:58am on a friday morning in September, the NEST mainframe monitored and logged a momentary data overflow that in a human would have translated into a panic attack. But of course the PSAI could not be afraid, could not panic.

When the first indication of a live Decepticon attack trickled through its wires, it merely sent out a blip of electronic one's and zero's to cause a red light to blink on the holographic map of Earth displayed in the Command room. Moscow, Russia. 9:19:43am

A second blip of data came in, informing it of a second Decepticon attack. PSAI put up another blinking red light on the map. Austin, Texas. 9:19:59am.

And a third, immediately on the tail of the second. Once more PSAI dotted the revolving holographic globe with a red light. London, Britain. 9:20:03am.

Any creature with the ability to be stunned, to feel anxiety, would have stared in shock at the three simulateous attacks. But the NEST mainframe did not have the ability to either feel or stare in shock, given its lack of eyes, so it merely continued sorting through the sudden reems of incoming data, throwing up red dots all over the map.

Another blip of data, another logged Decepticon attack. A blinking red light.

Beijing, the People's Republic of China. 9:20:18am.

And another attack, another red light.

Syndney, Austrailia. 9:20:24am.

Again its systems alerted PSAI of a Decepticon presence. Again the already bleeding map was wounded with a spot of red.

Baghdad, Iraq. 9:20:37am.

Signals continued to stream in through the NEST mainframe, and the mainfram continued to wail its alarms and throw up a blinking red light for every single one.

Again.

And again.

...And again....

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Author's Note: ...I think I'm going to have to rely on my loyal fans to protect me from the rabid Sunstreaker and Sideswipe fan girls howling for my blood right now. Unless, of course, my loyal fans are themselves original!Twin fans, in which case I'm doomed.

Yes, I did take liberties with some of the characters we didn't see much of in the movie, and no, I'm not going to bring anyone back from the dead/ change this story into a parody of about a zillion other twin fics I've seen. And if Sideswipe was, indeed, in Egypt, I didn't see it and I'm going to continue under the assumption that he wasn't. Sorry. (Keep in mind that I've never seen G1 people, and I'm trying to go with the personalities I was able to observe in the movies...kind of hard, considering some of them only had one line, if that). I'm also going to assume that Arcee was one being that could transform into three separate units.

I'm sure some of you smart people have picked up on the clues I've peppered throughout this chapter and now have a pretty good idea of what's happening on the Autobot side of the coin. Please, I beg you, if you DO know, keep it under your hat. I want it to be a surprise for everyone else.

And no matter what it may look like, this is NOT turning into a Sam/Bee romance. I already promised you guys it wouldn't, and I'm planning to stick to that.

That said, enjoy! I've now officially written a full-length book (even though I'm not done with this story yet). *Does a happy little dance* Yay!

Note: For those of you who didn't know, in the paper publishing world 100,000 words = a 200 page paper back novel.


	12. The Tolling of the Bells

_Sam opened his eyes to find himself in his room. His room, but somehow not his room. _

_Warm California sunshine streamed in through the window, but that was all, as if everything beyond the pane of glass had been washed away by light. _

_He sat at his desk, studying the walls. Huh. They were different now. He always forgot what they looked like later-- always forgot seeing them at all-- but when he returned to the room that was HIS and yet somehow not his _room_, the memory of them always came back as if it had never left. Except now. Now, something was different. _

_Sam worried about that for a moment, then shrugged. If the walls wanted to change, that was their decision. It was a free country after all--_

_--__**home no longer, a boat set adrift**__--_

_--so the walls certainly had the right to adjust themselves if they wished. And anyway, that was the least of his problems. He had tried to ignore it for a while, but now there was no denying that his chair had begun to morph from wood to metal and sprout dozens of little plugs and wires and tubes that probed at his shirt, seeking skin, itching to jack into his spine. Sam knew that if they did that the metal would spread to him as well, which he didn't want to happen. It tickled, too, all those little plugs feeling their way across his back. _

_His desk, in firm agreement with his chair, had decided to become a metal console-- its screen lit up, playing a black and white movie of nothing but vanishing cars. The sight of those vanishing cars-- disappear, reappear, disappear, reappear-- choked him with a sudden thrill of terror he couldn't explain. Sam needed to get away from them, get out of his room and escape the metal dentist's chair and those vanishing cars, or something truly awful would happen. _

_The walls were still changing as well. Suddenly all those little adjustments, unseen yet felt, were no longer a small annoyance. Somewhere, new data was flowing into the program that governed the walls. Somewhere, a constant was no longer constant. He wanted to stop it, force the program to go back to normal--_

_--__**ERROR. ATTEMPT FAILED. ATTEM**__--_

_--but he couldn't even seem to focus his eyes on the walls for long enough to figure out what was wrong, what was changing. So he bolted from his chair, tearing himself from the grip of the metal tendrils that had begun to loop around his arms and legs, and raced for the door. Nothing prevented him from exiting the room and thundering down the stairs, but he noticed with some disquiet that the program running through the walls of his room didn't stop at his door, but continued all throughout the house. Whenever he tried to look at them, whatever covered the walls slipped away from his line of sight, always fleeing at the edges of his vision. Sam felt certain that if he could only pin them_ (....them?...) _in place for a single instant he would realize what they were and what they meant._

_A nameless force pulled him towards the living room, but he hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. Someone had pulled up the carpet and planted grass instead, turning the whole downstairs into a graveyard full of jutting headstones. None of them had names; too many robots had died for all their names to be carved in their headstones. At the opposite end of the living room, sheetrock and grass gave way to dark metal. Apparently, Optimus and his cohorts had absconded with the living room and transformed it into a mini alien outpost, covering the walls with writhing metal snakes. The ceiling arched up to lofty, unfathomable heights-- higher than the clouds, than space, and higher still-- but he couldn't see anything of the outside world beyond that whispering curtain of snakes. Even here the program had changed, warped, accelerated, gained a new purpose and design, imprinted into the backs of those metal snakes and carried along in their undulating mass. But he still couldn't read it, couldn't understand it. Though he sensed that soon he would._

_--__**COMPLETION IMMINENT**__--_

_Optimus and Bumblebee had taken up residence in the metal corner of the living room, looking down with sad optics at the broken form of a man-sized robot. Jolt stood sobbing quietly in one corner. _

_"Is there anything that can be done?" Bumblebee whispered, voice trembling. He seemed....excited, yet terrified at the same time._

_"Not unless we remove his brain," Optimus sighed in return, "But Orion might object."_

_No longer standing in a corner, Jolt appeared just behind Sam's shoulder, leaning down to whisper in his ear. _

_"The walls. Look at the walls."_

_But Sam couldn't. "Bumblebee will hate me," he lamented._

_A tiny bubble of sound-- 'What is the nature of the soul?'_

_Still Sam couldn't look at the walls. He feared the changes in the program._

_--__**NECESSARY MODIFICATIONS TO STRUCTURE AND DESIGN**__--_

_Suddenly, no longer did he stand at one end of the living room gazing toward his friend and the broken little robot, he _was_ the broken, deactivated little robot, lying there with his arm snapped in two pieces and wishing he had a yellow blanket to use for a cast so it wouldn't hurt so much. His heart lay outside of his chest, smooth and slippery and dark red, but strangely enough it continued to beat even though he was dead, slithering arteries connecting it to the dark cave under his ribs. There was no pain and no blood, but it was still rather gross. _

_Lying on his back, Sam could see the metal ceiling beyond his friends, though he shied away from looking too closely, fearful of the program and what it would tell him if focused on it for too long. The answers were there, so obvious, yet just beyond reach and comprehension. Unthinkable._

_--'Unprecedented'-- The voice from before whispered. _

_Bumblebee crouched low over his broken form, weeping as Jolt had. _

_"It has to be done," he cried, pulling Sam's unresisting body into his arms, "I cannot risk continuing to be in his presence." And Bumblebee shocked him with blue lightning. Nothing happened. He was still dead dead dead. _

_Bumblebee dropped him again, no longer weeping, optics cold and hard and cruel, insectile mask stripping away his friend and leaving the only a skeleton, leaving only the Hornet. When he spoke, it was not his own voice that emerged, but that of Optimus._

_::Bumblebee is afraid::_

_And suddenly the walls loomed into view, their changes no longer a mystery. Alien symbols scrawled left and right, up and down, swirling over every surface, shifting, rearranging, reforming according to the demands of the program. The symbols had always been there, he remembered then, though now he could see the changes wrought in them. He couldn't define the difference, couldn't speak it aloud or in the hollows of his own mind, but abruptly he understood, and the understanding filled him with black terror, the jaws of horror yawning open into a bottomless chasm beneath his feet--_

*Tap-tap-tap*

With a start and a violent twitch, Sam jerked himself awake.

Eyes flashing open, he gasped in a harsh rattle of breath-- then another, and another. When at last the creeping realization that the vision had been no more than a dream trembled through him, his heart beat slowed from its panicked gallop into a more restrained sprint, air exploding past his lips in a woosh of relief.

The room surrounding him was dark and cool, the fistfuls of blanket strangled in his hands blissfully solid, yet for a moment in lay in disorientation, not quite sure where he was. He didn't remember checking into a hotel-- and the smell of tortilla chips was conspiciously absent, so it couldn't be his dorm room-- but neither did the feel of it remind him of his cramped home in Tranquility. Blinking up at the pale rectangle of the ceiling, it took a moment or two for the knowledge of his situation to rush back to his concious mind. Duh, he was at NEST. Not a hotel, not a dorm room, not the only home he knew several continents away. Just a barren, white walled prison cell that could have been stamped from a cookie cutter.

*Tap-tap-tap*

Sam flinched again at the unexpected sound, levering himself up on his elbows to stare at the door. Was someone knocking on the other side?

*Tap-tap-tap*

_"Sam, it's Dave! Are you in there?"_

Yep, apparently so. Sam fumbled for his watch, realized he must had taken it off (--_gentle, unfamiliar hands slipping open the clasp on the band_--), and rolled to the side to look at the alarm clock perched on the bedside table. 7:23. Ugh! Why did adults always try to get him up so early?! (Why did he feel like there was somewhere he needed to be?).

"Yeah," he croaked, though the word came out more as a question than a statement. He couldn't remember having gone to bed. For that matter, he couldn't remember what he'd done yesterday at all besides create zillions of bitch-slapping Decepticon doodles. He looked towards his desk and found that someone had removed the tray of congealing food.

"Um...." He flailed around for a bit, then finally remembered how to work his limbs and disentangled himself from the covers, tumbling awkwardly from the bed. "Come on in!"

The door opened, and a pressed and polished Agent Dave (snicker) strode into the room. Sam smoothed a hand over his head to try to flatten his sleep-mussed hair, feeling alarmingly young and insecure standing there in front of a gun-toting agent in pajamas. He couldn't remember changing out of his clothes, but he guessed he must have at some point the night before (--_strong arms around him, setting his limp form on the bed-- fingers unlacing his shoes, pulling them from his feet_--).

"Good morning," Dave said cheerfully (must be an evil mutant, no human should be so bright and sunny at 7am), "Did you sleep well?"

"I guess," Sam answered slowly, looking around for his clothes. He must have dumped them somewhere in a groggy haze. But seeing his jeans and hoody carefully folded on top of the dresser, his palms grew slick. No self-respecting teenager _ever_ folded their clothes, much less Sam, much less while too disoriented to even remember what he had been doing before collapsing into bed. "This is going to sound really psychotic and strange, but did you come in here and undress me last night?"

He knew at once from the alarmed look on Dave's face that that had been the wrong thing to say.

"Wait, not like that! Not like perverted pedophile undressing, the other kind of undressing-- you know, the kind parents sometimes do for sleepy little kids? ...That still sounds awkward. Just forget it." While he spoke, he crossed to the dresser and shook out the folded clothes, looking for some kind of clue. Maybe there would be a mysterious hair lingering on the fabric that he could use for DNA matching or something.

"No, I didn't." Dave looked at him strangely. "Why do you ask?"

Sam waved away the question, realizing he didn't actually want to know. God, if Lennox or someone had come in and helped him change out of his clothes he would never live it down--

"Lennox!" He gasped suddenly, tripping over the memory stirred by the internal utterance of the name. _That_ was what he was supposed to do, the reason why he felt he needed to be somewhere soon. He had to meet the Captain at 8, and it was already close to 7:30.

Dave chuckled lightly, though he still gazed at him with a critically appraising eye. "So you _do_ remember, after all. Optimus warned me that you might not, so he sent me down here to wake you up and take you to the cafeteria for breakfast before your lesson."

"Optimus?" Sam stopped halfway to the bathroom. He was determined to set a world record for how fast he could shower off-- the last thing he wanted was to make a bad impression on Lennox by being smelly, not when he needed to get down on his knees and beg the man to let his girlfriend come stay with him. Not that he'd managed to come up with an irrefutable argument to use in any case, but it was too late to concoct one-- he'd have to wing it.

Dave smiled patiently. "You know-- thirty-foot-tall robot, red and blue, makes speeches?"

Thinking better of going into the bathroom with nothing on hand to change into, Sam backtracked to the dresser and dug out another pair of jeans and a t-shirt. "No, I know who Optimus is. But what does he have to do with anything?"

"The way I hear it, you were with him until almost 4am last night."

As he spoke, the dam on Sam's memories broke and the entire debacle came flooding back to him-- including the fact that no one had heard from Bumblebee in many hours (--_Bee, no_!--). He kept his head above the waters of panic by clinging to the fact that Optimus would have told him if anything had gone horribly wrong, though that didn't rule out the possibility that something _had_ gone wrong without the Autobots' knowledge. Grudgingly he was forced to admit that there was nothing he could do but hope for the best, though he still wondered how, besides logic, Optimus knew that Bee was okay _(--'two very good reasons'--two--two--'cannot yet tell you'_--).

"Oh. Right." Choking down the bitter bile of fear, he gathered his courage and a change of clothes and sprinted for the bathroom door. "I stink like corn chips right now, so I'm gonna take a quick shower. Could you wait for me outside? I don't know where I'm supposed to meet Lennox."

"Or where the cafeteria is," Dave reminded him, voice edging on stern, reminding Sam that, as someone in cohorts with Optimus, the agent probably knew about the uneaten food that had sat overnight on his desk.

"That too."

Sam had no inclination to make himself late for his meeting with Lennox by wasting time on something as trival as eating, but he saw no need to inform the agent of that. He'd probably squeal on him to Optimus-- no, to _Rachet, _and the uber creepy alien doctor would probably try to do something like shove a tube down his throat when he found out. No, thank you.

Sam nearly tripped over the misplaced trashcan when he threw open the bathroom door. His heart leapt into his throat at the sight of the present ratting around in the bottom, bow slightly mashed out of shape on one side. The gift reminded him of Bee's anger, causing the sickening self-disgust from the day before to come rushing back. The feeling had all but evaporated after his talk with Orion/Optimus, but it returned as ripe and foul as ever at the sight of the unopened willing to waste a single moment wallowing in self-pity, he moved the transcan under the sink, shucked off his pj's, peeled the sling from his cast (don't look don't look), and jumped in the shower. It was rather difficult to get clean when working around both a cast and a stitched arm (he ended up taking off Rachet's bandage, deciding that he would simply have to put up with the robot's bitching) but somehow he managed it without falling and breaking another bone. In a record span of time worthy of the Guiness book of world records, he bolted from the shower, dried off, put on his clothes and the sling, and rushed out of the bathroom.

As he had promised, Dave awaited him in the hallway, leaning against one wall and gazing at his watch. He smiled as Sam emerged, the door sliding closed behind him.

"Four minutes. Not bad."

Sam smiled wanely at the praise, already moving off down the hallway at a fast clip. "Thanks. Let's hurry up and get this eating thing over with. I have to meet Lennox in about--"

He stopped, looking at his bare wrist, and realized he still wasn't wearing his watch and had no clue as to its whereabouts.

"Thirty minutes," the agent supplied, "Plenty of time for a short detour to pick up your watch along the way." At Sam's fish-out-of-water impression, he elaborated, "When Optimus called me to come pick you up this morning, he said that your watch had stopped and that he'd dropped it off with Wheeljack to have it fixed. --Either that, or to have the mad engineer make you another one. Pray it doesn't explode," Dave chuckled at what must have been an inside joke, though Sam had never heard of any 'wheeljack' and hadn't the faintest idea what might have been funny about things blowing up.

But any speculations on mad engineers and mushroom clouds dissipated with mention of his watch and the mental cold shower that followed. More specifically, at the mention that Optimus had noticed something wrong with it and the implication that the alien had _taken it from his wrist_.

After all, if the alien could create a hologram able to hug someone, what was to say he couldn't also create a hologram able to carry a traquilized human back to his room and tuck him in for the night?

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As it turned out, Dave was terrible at estimation. Sam made a mental note to himself to remember that when the agent said 'short detour' he really meant 'five mile hike in the opposite direction from where we need to go'.

So on their five-mile hike to Wheeljack's lab, Sam fretted about the possibility that an _alien_, albiet a benevolent alien, might have carted his limp and helpless form back to his room, stripped him down to his underwear, and dressed him in pj's. Not that he was worried that he'd been molested in his sleep-- Optimus was a _robot_, he didn't have reproductive parts or hormonal urges-- but the very idea made his stomach fold up into uncomforable knots. He couldn't really pin point why, but it did.

Sam consoled himself with the logical hitch in the hologram scenario-- electrical charges may have been able to fool nerves into sensing heat and pressure, but a cloud of tiny nanomachines would not have been able to lift a human, not even with fully charged batteries capable of powering New York city. Because a nanomachine cloud was just that-- a _cloud_, not solid matter capable of transporting other matter.

Yet somehow, the chain of reasoning did little to alleviate the awful twisting feeling in his gut.

As they walked, Dave filled him in about the new Cybertronian.

"Wheeljack arrived about three months ago," he began, "Apparently, he was an engineer back on Cybertron-- a very talented one as we've discovered-- if slightly eccentric. He's been helping us improve our defense systems and expand the base. Nice robot, very friendly. Keep your distance."

Sam yanked himself from his musings at the off-hand warning.

"Why? Trigger happy?"

Dave snorted, the tolerant smile a parent would wear when observing a trouble-making child twitching up the corners of his lips. "No. According to his file, Wheeljack only has one main weapon (unless you count his IQ as a weapon, in which case he may very well be the most deadly of the Autobots) but it's designed more for self-defense than target practice. The thing you need to worry about is his insatiable curiosity."

A shiver of dread worked its way down Sam's spine. "Would he try to dissect me?" he tried to joke, not completely able to hide the tremor in his voice.

To his relief, Dave replied, "From what I've seen, Wheeljack wouldn't harm a fly." But then the agent went on, "Though if given the chance he might study you for hours, and if you volunteered he would happily do exploratory surgery."

"....Isn't that what they do to dead frogs?"

To his amazement (and fear) the agent only laughed.

"Sam, with Wheeljack you'd be more in danger of him putting something back _in _that's not supposed to be there as an 'upgrade' than being left cut open to die. He may be a mad scientist, but he's a conscientious mad scientist."

"Great," Sam rasped, "now I feel totally reassured."

Their detour took them to a part of the base Sam had not yet explored in his random wanderings. The halls all looked the same, but the black numbers on the metal doors changed, shrinking back from 330 towards 1. There was also a sudden increase in noise to deliniate the deserted living quarters from the operational parts of the base, though the sounds didn't resemble human voices, ringing telephones, and clacking computer keys so much as a general hubbub of ceaseless activity. As they drew nearer, another sound made itself heard above the ruckus-- Cybertronian. Dave hadn't been kidding when he said it was an alien experimental lab.

Rounding a corner, Sam caught sight of an open hanger door in the right wall. But his attention was immediately diverted from the door itself to the black scorch marks lapping at the floor, ceiling and walls of the surrounding hallway. He'd almost thought the agent had been exaggerating when he said 'explosions'. Obviously not. 'Explosion' almost seemed like an understatement, given that the wall opposite the open door sported a very large, crater-like dent where something like a tweny foot hanger door had erupted outward, burst from its hinges, and smashed against the metal and concrete hard enough to bow it outwards.

Sam gulped, wondering if he should start running or accept his fate like a man. Dave settled the matter for him by clamping a hand on his shoulder and steering him inside.

Given his experience with Rachet's infirmary, he'd expected to find himself in another unfathomably alien room. Instead, beyond the hanger doors he discovered something that looked....very much like an airplane hanger. Only bigger. And stuffed with machinery and discarded pieces of scrap.

....were those post-it notes littering the floor?

The room itself could have served double duty as a warehouse, and it appeared that Wheeljack was halfway towards fulfilling that purpose by stuffing floor to ceiling metal shelves with discarded equipment and broken devices that would not have looked out of place at a junk yard. Workbenches-- _human_-sized workbenches-- formed a loose horseshoe around the center of the space, crammed with every concievable piece of advanced technology a cyber geek could dream up. Though no living being stood by to attend to them, several vats of liquid bubbled quietly on the tables, contents traveling through glass tubes and flasks (and sometimes, seemingly, through thin air), while holographic data displays set up adjacent to them took virtual notes. Many other experiments hummed quietly along their merry way throughout the room, monitored only by advanced computers.

While Sam would have expected a robotic scientist to be meticulously neat, Wheeljack seemed to be anything but. Miscellaneous _things_ crowded on top of each other on every horizontal surface, stacked three feet deep in some places. Machinery parts littered the floor, as though the alien had been in the process of deconstructing them and had simply never returned to finish or clean up. There were yellow post-in notes stuck to everything, some so old they had turned almost white. Though most were scrawled with detailed notes in red sharpie, some held only a question mark, and still others had been left blank, as though the scatter-brained genius had forgotten what he wanted to write in the middle of writing it.

The fact that such a creature-- one with ADD and pack rat tendancies-- inhabited a powerful robotic body and was reportedly _very_ curious about humans unnerved him to no end.

They stopped just inside the door. After a moment of taking in the room's non-living contents, it dawned on him that he had yet to see anyone, cybertronian or human, lurking within. Again he eyed the small workbenches, thinking of the high table in the infirmary, and wondered at the fact that he had heard only alien voices rather than human ones.

"Where is he?" Sam whispered to Dave, almost afraid to break the silence. As soon as he spoke, a loud clang echoed from somewhere within, followed by a litany of aliens screeches and whirls that sounded like foul cursing.

"Hey, Wheeljack!" the agent called out, "I've got a friend for you to meet! Come say hi!"

"My apologies, Dave," a familiar mellow voice replied, though no robot appeared to accompany it. Instantly, Sam realized why everything in the room was sized to fit a human-- Wheeljack was none other than the spindy white robot he had seen in the command center the night before. From what he remembered, the engineer couldn't have been more than six feet tall. "But I'm afraid I'm very busy working on a project for Prime right now. If his predictions are correct, our new human companion will have need of it very shortly, and I am loathe to pause now that I have started. Come back later."

Sam blinked in confusion. If 'new human companion' was meant to refer to him, why was Wheeljack so worried about repairing his watch?

But Dave only grinned, not appearing to find the comment at all strange. "I'll give you three guesses who I have with me right now, and the first two don't count unless you turn your external sensors back on."

Finally, a robotic torso leaned into view around a column of accumulated stuff to regard them with its blue optics-- all three of them.

Of all the Autobots he had yet encountered, Sam was convinced that Wheeljack won the award for most alien appearance, hands down. His head and face in no way resembled a human's-- he had no mouth or nose, only an tiered face plate framed by a clicking pair of mandibles. There were two blue optics centered about where a human's eyes would be, but one was much larger than the other and jutted from his face like a telescoping lense. His third optic did not appear to be an optic so much as a brass spyglass mounted directly below his left (and smaller) standard blue optic, restlessly zooming in and out to focus on the pair (or on their intestines or bones, for all he knew the alien probably had x-ray vision).

Swept back from either side of Wheeljacks's head were illuminated panels that fluttered gently forward and back like the wings of a cubist butterfly, like the fins of an exotic fish drifting in a pond. Every color imaginable swirled across their mirror-smooth surfaces-- deep indigo faded into robin's egg blue, blue churned into lime green, green burst into sunshine yellow.

Sam could only stare in astonishment and awe, wondering if the panels worked like mood rings-- and if so, what exactly cavorting green and yellow signified.

"Oh! Sam!" Wheeljack exclaimed, voice bubbling with excitement in a way he would have never expected from such an alien being. "I was wondering when I would get to meet you properly. I tried to talk to you yesterday in the command center after the meeting, but you were unresponsive for a long time."

"Um...I was?" He asked inanely as the gleaming white robot glided towards them in three long-legged strides. His legs were far different from those of the other Autobots' (and from those of any human) in that they were jointed like a velociraptor's-- the robot walked on his 'toes' with the ankle joint almost parallel to the knee. Sam could see why Wheeljack was a scientist rather than a warrior-- he was stick thin and unarmored, lanky and jointed in odd places like an oragami sculpture. But his initial estimate had been incorrect; the robot stood closer to eight feet than six. It must have been the presence of the other, taller Autobots and his high vantage point from the cat walk that had made him seem shorter.

"Yes. I believe your mental retreat scared Prime a great deal, though he will never admit to it. Jolt insisted that he could bring you out of it, and obviously he must have considering the fact that you are now standing here rather than sitting where you were," the alien leaned in close, examining his face with his three whirling optics. Then, as if sensing the simmering anxiety his proximity caused, he pulled away again before Sam could take a step back. "Oh, please excuse me. I tend to forget myself when I am excited. As this is the first time we have officially met, I believe introductions are in order."

To Sam's amazement, the alien held out one many-fingered hand in a familiar-- and very human-- greeting. "Good morning. Buenos dias. My terran designation is Wheeljack, though my friends call me Jack." And he shuttered one optic in a wink.

Grinning hesitantly, Sam held out his own hand to the alien. "Hi. I'm Sam. Nice to meet you."

Spidery fingers wrapped around the offered appendage and continued over his wrist and forearm, shaking up and down with enthusiasm despite the awkward hold. "It is nice to meet you as well, Sam. I look forward to bonding with you," at Sam's strange look, he corrected, "Excuse me. I meant getting to know you. Some things do not translate well, I have found."

After almost a good thirty seconds of shaking, Wheeljack pulled Sam's hand closer to examine the line of stitches in his arm, bringing up his other hand to wrap around the human limb.

"You are injured?"

"Rachet took care of it," Sam hastened to assure him, though Dave claimed Wheeljack was an engineer rather than a medic.

The white robot gently spread the fingers of his captured hand, tracing the bones through the skin.

"The design of the human body has never ceased to fascinate me," he admitted, gingerly prodding his wrist and forearm, "Particularly given the inherent illogic behind the endoskeletal structure. It provides no protection whatsoever, and yet humans can be remarkably hardy despite the potential for injury."

"Wheeljack?" Sam asked hesitantly when the alien showed no inclination to let go, "What are you doing?"

"Taking preliminary observations and measurements. Detailed scans suffice to a degree, but I have found that I work better when I have the opprotunity to 'get my hands dirty', as it were."

He blinked at the simultaneously straightforward and confounding answer, looking to Dave for intervention. The agent only shrugged in a 'humor him' kind of way, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

"And you need to get your hands dirty because...." Sam prompted when the engineer didn't explain further.

"Because it would be rather difficult to complete my current project without a detailed study of its intended subject."

Wheeljack released his arm, only to duck in and begin to feel along both sides of his rib cage with his hands. Sam stiffened into a block of wood, veins flooding with an icy chill at the close contact (--_'exploratory surgery'--). _The face hovering inches from his own, mechanical eyes gazing through him rather than at him, did not look like Megatron's. Fear, however, erased any dividing line between the two-- the glint of scientific eagerness to the three whirling optics iced over, became nothing more than the detached gaze of a mindless machine that felt neither pain nor sympathy and would plunge its needle-like fingers into his chest to stop his heart without a second thought while headfins flashed with cold light and mandibles clicked with the restless, insectile hiss of alien language--

"W-why do you need to study me for a _watch_?" He protested weakly, voice wavering.

But the robot, the alien, either couldn't hear him or felt it beneath him to answer (--_nothing but an insect--'maggot!'--)_ and said nothing. His third optic, a beady camera lense as black and smooth as a drop of oil, telescoped in and out, rotating slowly, utterly devoid of life and emotion. The hands roved upwards, pulling away from his rib cage, but before Sam could breathe a sigh of relief they settled again on either side of his neck--several fingers probed his vertebrae and the back of his skull, sifting through his hair, while others hooked gently under his chin and slowly twisted his head from side to side. His insides turned to water at the thought of how easily the Autobot could break his neck (--_a single flick and the man went flying, bones snapping like twigs_--).

"That's enough, Wheeljack," Dave interjected firmly, striding forward to his rescue, "You're frightening him. Give the kid a little breathing room."

At the sound of a human voice, the spell of terror was broken, and the world snapped back into focus. Sam blinked, and suddenly the grasping claws on his shoulders reverted back into harmless fingers, their ministrations once more utterly gentle rather than lethal. Though strange and unearthly, the three whirling optics no longer appeared devoid of life and emotion-- their faint blue glow warmed and thawed, glinting with purpose and intent of a benign rather than malignant nature.

As though the reprimand had broken him from a trace of his own, Wheeljack flinched slightly and pulled his head away, studying Sam from a distance with a baffled air. Startled by whatever he found, he immediately retracted his spindly fingers and pulled his hands in close to his body. Optics still fixed intently on Sam, he slid back first one step, then a second, putting almost ten feet of space between them, head fins darkening to a forest green as he went. The color seemed somehow _depressed_.

"Forgive me," he murmured softly after a moment, "It was not my intention to alarm you. I suppose I did not consider the severity of a stress response triggered by physical contact-- though I should have, given the negative experiences you have had with my kind in the past."

Sam concentrated on breathing in slowly through his nose, trying to bring the rapid thundering of his heart under control. When at last the roaring in his ears quieted and his arms and legs stopped trembling, he looked up at wheeljack (when had he looked away?) and tried to smile.

"I'm good. I'm fine," he brushed it off, applauding himself for how level and sane his voice sounded. "You just startled me-- wait, how do you know about....all that?"

He twiddled the fingers of his good hand in the air to indicate all the things he couldn't seem to bring himself to say. Being chased and shot at by Decepticons. Being chased by Megatron _(--'I smell you, boy!'_--). Falling off a building after being shot at by said butt-ugly robot. Being molested by a medusa-haired tongue robot masquerading as a hot blonde. Being captured by Megatron and his cronies, pinned to a slab of concrete, and having a robotic worm squirm around inside his skull. Then getting chased/ shot at AGAIN while running through an Egyptian desert, getting blasted (again!) by Megatron, dying, and coming back to life. So yeah, he could work the 'negative experience causing stress reactions' angle. But Dave had said that Wheeljack had only been on Earth for three months-- how did he know about stuff that happened almost two years ago?

His question seemed to revive the engineer a little-- he straightened from his submissive crouch, adding a splash of hopeful yellow to the muted sea of dark green.

"Prime informed us of all you had gone through to aid us in our quest for the Allspark, and more recently of your efforts to reactivate him from involuntary stasis lock and forestall the destruction of your sun by the Fallen," Wheeljack explained, shuffling a few steps closer. His fingers clicked restlessly together the way a human would wring their hands, appearing to hesitate between keeping his distance and touching him again, maybe to offer some kind of comfort. Tilting his head like a curious dog, he continued, "We have all been very anxious to meet you, though I believe I may have, ah, 'jumped the gun' in my observations, as a tactile bond has yet to be formed between us."

Sam latched onto the word 'observation', remembering the engineer's disjointed explanation about studying him for some project. He still couldn't make the connection between fixing a watch and needing to feel up his head, though. Maybe the watch thing was just a weird alien pretext.

Deciding to make the first move towards relaxing the tension between them, Sam stepped towards the engineer (--_don't cringe!--) _and asked,"'Tactile bond'?"

Seeing his willing approach, the colors swirling across Wheeljack's headfins brightened even further, once more becoming a bubbly yellow-green.

"Humans are intrinsically tactile creatures," he bobbed his head as though listening to music only he could hear, "The strongest of the interpersonal bonds you form with others are founded on an instinctual reaction to their touch-- being comforted when a sibling puts their hand on your shoulder, for instance, or relaxing into a hug with one's mate. You, Sam, are comfortable when in physical contact with another human. But as I have been told (and now have observed for myself), the negative connotations your mind associates with my kind cause you to flinch and recoil when Jolt or even Bumblebee-- both of whom mean you no harm-- tries to touch you."

It was _very _eery and WAY awkward to have the tangled inner workings of his mind sorted under neat little headings and displayed for his intimate viewing pleasure in such a clinical and detached manner. And embarassing, though Wheeljack hadn't said something like 'he still wears Barney underwear' (which he _didn't_). Maybe it was just having all his hang ups put out there for everyone to see that caused him to blush faintly.

Not wanting to consider the implications of that, he scuffed his feet moodily along the concrete. "So?"

"So it is in the interest of both your comfort and safety that we attempt to form positive associations with touch in your mind."

Sam understood that. Intellectually. But it still made him feel disturbingly like a shivering rescue dog being rehabilitated.

"Why safety?" he snapped, tone sharper than he had intended. But, damnit, he was a living, breathing, _thinking_ person-- not a _pet_.

Wheeljack drew back slightly as if from a poisonous snake, glancing towards Dave before focusing all three of his optics on Sam.

"Think about it," he urged, "What would happen if, during a battle, an unfamiliar Autobot attempted to pull you out of the way of a rampaging Decepticon, and you _jerked back out of instinctual fear and ended up getting killed_?"

Sam grimaced. "Well, when you put it that way...." he trailed off, looking up at Wheeljack's timidly hopeful posture and catching a glint of mewling worry to his alien optics. And suddenly it dawned on him that the engineer seemed almost _fearful_ of his reaction. Immediately he wanted to kick himself, feeling like an absolute heel. For all his psycho-babble jargon, the robot seemed to genuinely care about him, though he had no idea why. And here he was acting like a snotty little brat to the eccentric, friendly alien. Way to go, Sam.

"Maybe we can do this half way," he offered, forcing up a smile for the white robot, "Like, get to be friends first before going in for any world-championship snuggle sessions. Humans are definitely touchy-feely, but even we don't go around hugging complete strangers-- well, those of us who aren't escapists from mental asylums, anyway."

Wheeljack visibly brightened, moving to a bench along one wall and digging through a pile of stuff. To Sam's bewilderment, he withdrew a pad of yellow post-it notes and a red sharpie, pulling off the cap with a small pop and scrawling a word across the top sheet. He had never seen a Cybertronian of any description write by hand, and some part of him had assumed that they couldn't. But watching the engineer handle the marker, holding it vertically in his claw-like grip, he realized it was silly to think that just because he had never seen alien penmanship in action.

Highlighting whatever he had written with a final loop of the sharpie, Wheeljack pulled back, replaced the cap on the marker, and peeled of the top post-it. Holding the crinkled piece of paper between his fingers like a talisman, he shuffled back towards Sam.

Sam held himself stock still as the robot approached (--_don't cringe_--), determined not to freak out like he had the first time. But despite his fevered imaginings, the engineer only stuck the yellow square of paper on the front of his shirt, smoothing it down. Then he stepped back, watching him hesitantly, waiting for his reaction.

Sam looked down at the post-it note he had been labeled with, trying to decipher the single word upside down. When he finally recognized what Wheeljack had written (and outlined with a lopsided circle) he laughed, grinning fiercely with the sudden flood of emotion rising in his chest.

It wasn't hard to spot the unspoken apology embodied in the yellow badge. Especially when it read: 'FRIEND'.

Okay, he definitely liked Wheeljack.

"Thanks," he said, still smiling, and meant it.

A sudden reel of electronic (though not Cybertronian) beeps startled Sam into a full-body twitch. He jerked around towards the source, stunned to find Dave standing a few feet behind him. He had almost forgotten that there was someone else in the room. The agent pulled open one side of his jacket, extracting-- of all low tech things-- a pager. Although given that cellphones had squat in the way of reception in the underground base, he supposed using a pager made sense.

Whatever message the little device displayed upset the agent to no end. His brow furrowed low over flinty eyes, and he swore softly under his breath.

"I hate to interrupt," he said, replacing the pager, "But Sam needs to eat before his meeting with Captain Lennox at 8. If we could have his watch, perhaps the two of you could finish this another time....?"

"Oh yes! I have that ready for you, Sam." Wheeljack loped back to the same workbench that had held the pad of post-it notes and eased open the lid of a red Coleman tool box. Despite its designed purpose, the metal container was filled with assorted nicknaks rather than tools.

"What was that?" Sam asked of Dave as Wheeljack rifled through his collection of junk, "What did you get paged for?"

The agent shook his head. "Just a meeting I need to attend. Don't worry about it. Although--" he glanced at his own watch, "--I may end up skipping it. This took longer than I expected; it's almost 8 now, and someone has to show you the way to the shooting range."

"Shooting range?" Sam eeped, then rolled his eyes at his own idiocy. "Oh. Duh. Shooting guns requires a shooting range, I guess."

"I would be perfectly capable of escorting him," Wheeljack offered, turning back to them with a black banded watch dangling from his fingers, "Ironhide has been pinging my comm receptors for the last few minutes inquiring as to my whereabouts. --I have been helping the soldiers test a new species of weapon," he added to Sam, tossing the watch in his direction.

Wanting to look slick and cool, he tried to catch it with one hand, failed spectacularly, and ended up fumbling with it for a few seconds before pinning it to his chest. Smooth, Sam. Real smooth. But as he strapped it to his wrist, a niggling suspicion arose in his mind. If Wheeljack had already finished with his watch, what had the engineer been working on when they arrived? For that matter, what did he need 'measurements' for?

Oblivious to Sam's swirling internal thoughts, Dave shook his head in response to Wheeljack's offer. "That's my job. Besides, knowing Ironhide he wants you there _now_, and I can't in good conscience ask you to face his wrath by waiting until _after_ Sam has eaten something to go lend a hand." He spoke the last part with a pointed glare in Sam's direction. Sam glared back, trying to directly trasmit the words 'I don't need a babysitter' into the agent's mind. Or failing that, tattoo them to his forehead.

"Look, it really won't make a good impression on Lennox if I'm late, and I can always go to breakfast after learning how to put holes in things," he reasoned. It would also give him the chance to weasel more information about Optimus' 'project' from the engineer, though he didn't add that out loud.

Wheeljack, for his part, seemed ready to bounce with delight at the fact that Sam _wanted_ to go with him. "Certainly! I can handle it from here, Dave. We wouldn't want you to get in trouble by being later for your meeting, after all."

The bleeting whine of the agent's pager cut off any rebuttal poised on his tongue. With a defeated sigh, he pulled it out and switched it off with only a cursory glance at the message it displayed.

"Alright. I guess I'm out numbered. Behave, both of you."

(_All hail the mighty Agent Dave, for he has spoken!)_

Raising a questioning eyebrow at Sam when he started to burst at the seams from surpressed giggles, the man turned and left the alien laboratory.

Finally alone with his intended prey, Sam twisted towards Wheeljack.

"So. What have you been working on recently?" He leaned to the side, trying to peer around the mounds of stuff at whatever may have been hidden deep within the lab. Catching on to what he was trying to do, Wheeljack lightly set a hand on his shoulder and steered him towards the door. Sam tried not to jump out of his skin at the touch.

"Many things. Automated defense systems, a communication device that would rest inside the aural cavity itself rather than outside of it where the chances of losing it are much higher, special anti-Decepticon firearms for human use--"

"Anything to do with me?" Sam interjected into the enthusiastic stream of words as they passed into the hallway, trying to divert his eyes from the telltale scorch marks (what could make an explosion like that?).

"Well, I _did_ do some work on your watch."

"What was wrong with it?"

Wheeljack glanced at him curiously.

"Nothing was wr-- ah, I see."

Alarm bells started ringing in his head at the unfinished sentence.

"See what?"

But Wheeljack only turned away from him, uneasiness radiating from every inch of his metal skin.

"Nothing. If Prime has not told you, then I will assume he has a reason for you not to know. --But come on! I'm sure you will find a demonstration of the new Thermite projectiles quite intriguing."

Sam doubted he would find _anything_ intriguing that was meant to distract him, but he sensed that any attempt to question the engineer further would be met with more rambling dialogue, producing as little in the way of results as questioning a doorknob. A dark scream of frustration began to build in his chest. Just when it seemed that Optimus was going to be open with him, the robot turned around and began hoarding secrets again, spinning a web of plans and counterplans behind his back.

Comparing the images of Orion and Optimus in his mind-- one open and fatherly, the other cold, aloof, and full of inexplicable sorrow-- Sam realized that Bumblebee wasn't the only Autobot who wore a mask. And he wondered just what the alien leader's was meant to hide.

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The shooting range, as it turned out, was not as far away as he had feared. Made sense, really-- if a bunch of roudy marines/roudy Autobots were going to be blasting off all kinds of explosive weapons, you would want to contain the fallout as far from sleeping humans and delicate equipment as possible. Upon entering, he could immediately see (or rather hear) why-- the sound of dozens of firearms being discharged in rapid succession assulted his ears with slightly less force than a sonic boom.

The shooting range itself bore some resemblance to a bowling alley-- lanes walled with bullet-proof plexiglass spanned the length of the room, separating the shooters (and their bullets) from one another. Arranged at the far end of each lane like impressionist bowling pins were tiered rows of moving targets, some bearing the traditional red-and-white bullseye pattern, others stapled with carboard cutouts of various Decepticons. In one lane a sneering Starscream had his leg shot off by a burly marine; in another, Megatron acquired a small round hole through his forehead.

At the far end of the room, clear plexiglass had been tempered with the same brown coating they used on celebrity limos to block out glare. Sam couldn't see anything of what was happening in those lanes, though a continual stream of people-- some wearing camouflage, others labcoats-- milled about in the area. All, to his surprise, wore tinted goggles.

Suddenly, though he couldn't see any shots being fired, a brilliant flash lit up the far end of one of the lanes, its light so intense that it cut easily through the dark glaze.

"Thermite!" Wheeljack yelled by his ear to be heard over the continual roar. "A mixture of aluminum powder and iron-three-oxide that is ignited by a magnesium fuse on contact, creating a flare of 4500 degree heat that is hot enough to melt through Decepticon armor. Standard cartridge projectiles cannot penetrate our armor, and the Sabot rounds your military prefers to combat our enemies are far too unweildly to be used by anything but a tank or aircraft. Thus the use of Thermite-- we've been working on a mixture that can be employed in normal infantry weapons to give your soldiers the same firepower as a Sabot round in a package that they can easily carry with them."

A hulking black shadow in the corner moved. Sam jumped, realizing that Ironhide was crouched before one of the darkened lanes. The weapons specialist scoffed at the marine who had fired the previous shot.

"Pathetic," he grumbled, "Watch this."

He lowered one of his cannons to ground level, popping open the revolving magazine. A scientist in a labcoat approached, carting a round the size of a mail tube in his arms. He slid the test round into Ironhide's cannon, then stepped back as the heavily armored Autobot lifted his arm, snapped the magazine closed with a turn of the wrist, and fired down the lane.

A thunderous roar bellowed through the room, followed by another dazzling flash of light. Suddenly Sam understood the need for the goggles.

"Not bad," the marine conceded, ignoring the mechanical snort of disbelief from the Autobot and reloading his own weapon.

A heavy human hand landed on Sam's shoulder, jolting him from the suspended awe that had fallen over him watching Ironhide and the marine compare firepower.

"Don't worry 'bout Ironhide, kid. He just likes to show off," a hearty voice instructed him.

Sam twisted around, looking up into a familiar brown face. He almost didn't recognize Epps at first-- it seemed impossible that the man could be anything but covered with dirt and dripping with sweat, sporting a I'm-gonna-bust-your-ass scowl on his face. Instead, the Sergeant was smiling. And clean.

"Here, this should help." A pair of padded headphones settled themselves around his ears, muting the razor edge of the booming cracks echoing around the room.

"Thanks!" Sam yelled in return, hoping Epps could hear him. Apparently he could, if the predatory smile was anything to go by. A hand snagged his collar and dragged him away from Wheeljack, towing him towards a man that turned and grinned at their approach. Nervous anticipation fluttered through him, clenching like a fist around his stomach. _Lennox_.

"Will's thinking about kicking your ass to Mars and back for being fifteen minutes late." Epps informed him.

Lennox laughed as the hand around Sam's collar deposited him in front of the Captain.

"Don't listen to him, Sam," he advised, replacing Epps' hand with his own and propelling him towards an unoccupied shooting booth, "I plan to kick your ass to Mars and back, _then_ put you through Marine boot camp. --I got him, Jack! Thanks!" He added over his shoulder to Wheeljack, popping off a small wave. Sam turned a pleading expression to the engineer, but the alien merely waved in return and mooseyed off towards Ironhide. So much for expecting help from the eccentric robot.

Now that he actually had Lennox to himself, he was terrified. The army Captain was a Decepicreep-bashing _machine,_ and more than a little intimdating (--'_You're a soldier now!--)._ And Sam, in a fit of delirium, had put himself at his mercy. With GUNS.

But then his thoughts drifted to Mikaela, and he straightened his spine. Even if he got his ass trampled on for shooting his foot off in a controlled (and therefore, supposedly, Sam-proof) situation, he had to try to use his time with Lennox to convince the head of security to make an exception for his girlfriend. If he couldn't have _someone _who loved him around, he would probably go bat-shit crazy within a few months.

And, if he could, he needed to learn how to handle a gun so he could protect Bumblebee. Even if the scout hated him. He would rather have his friend still be around to hate him than the alternative. There was no way, _no way_, that he was going to see his friend laid out in that concrete graveyard. Not if he had anything to say about it.

"So...you want to learn how to use a gun, huh? Thinking about joining up with the rest of us alien-hunting grunts?" Lennox asked, pulling him into the booth. Though there wasn't a door to seal off the space, even the presence of three walls helped to deaden the cacophony of noise significantly. Two sets of three different kinds of hand guns were lined up on a shallow counter in front of the firing lane. A two-foot-tall Bonecrusher leered at him from the opposite wall.

The thought of hefting the solid, deadly weight of one of those guns in his hand and pointing it at a Decepticon (even one made of paper) caused goosebumps to break out over his arms. He fought back a shiver.

"No way! --Not to be insulting, or anything, cause that's your job, that's what you do-- and you guys are great at it, by the way-- but I don't think I'm cut out for that sort of...thing."

Lennox sighed theatrically, reaching for one of the guns. "Maybe not right now, but I'll get you on my team sooner or later. Just you wait."

And to their mutual shock, a mellow voice called back across the room, "Dibbs."

The Captain cringed, then stuck his head outside the booth, looking back towards Wheeljack. The alien didn't seem to be paying them any attention, engrossed in working on some whatsit on a table in the experimental area. Lennox grimaced.

"Damn alien hearing," he muttered, pulling himself back inside the booth with Sam. He glanced at Sam's chest, then stared. A hand shot out and snagged the yellow post-it stuck to his shirt, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it over one shoulder. The loss of the little 'friend' badge hurt more than he thought it would. Though it was silly to be so attached to a piece of paper, he couldn't help but shoot an icy glare in the Captain's direction. Luckily Lennox missed the expression.

"Alright. Welcome to firearms 101," he began, picking up one of the guns lined up on the shelf. "Rule number one: I am the King. The head Honcho. God. You listen to me and you listen good, got it?"

Sam nodded mutely, not trusting himself to speak as Lennox pointed the muzzle towards the ceiling and cocked the gun. Then, without warning, he whirled and aimed the gun down the firing lane, letting off a single shot. The thunderclap the bullet made as it was loosed from the barrel rang in the space between his ears, stunning in its intensity. Lennox turned back to him, holding up the gun.

"This is a _weapon_, not a toy. Hopefully you already knew that, otherwise we've got a lot of work to do. One mistake could kill someone-- if that happens, you don't just get to say 'oops'. So if I say fire, you fire. If I say freeze, you freeze. If I tell you to do a hundred push ups, you better do them, because you've probably done something stupid and need to have it ground into your brain. Are we clear?"

Sam almost swallowed his tongue, though he was determined not to shrink away. He could do this. He needed to do this. He looked Lennox in the eye and replied, "Yessir. You are God."

Apparently, despite his fears of being slapped for sarcasm, that was the right thing to say. The Captain nodded his approval. "Good." He set down the long barreled gun and selected another. "Rule number two: even if you are 110% sure your gun isn't loaded, don't point it at anything you aren't prepared to kill. No matter how sure you are, there's always a chance you're wrong. So keep the barrel aimed at the floor or ceiling at all times, though unless there are people on the second floor you should point it at the ceiling. Not much fun to shoot yourself in the foot. Trust me."

Unable to help himself, Sam cracked a grin, "Speaking from experience?"

Lennox slid a glare in his direction. "Watch it, kid. I'm God, remember?" he growled, though not unkindly.

"Yessir."

"This--" Lennox drew his attention to the new gun he held, "Is the model you're going to learn your way around today. .22 caliber rounds, low recoil, easy for newbies to handle. Right now its unloaded," he popped the magazine open to show him, "and it's going to stay that way until I'm certain you're ready to handle shooting it. But before you pull the trigger, you need to learn how to actually use this baby-- how to hurt the creeps you need to hurt, and how to keep from killing everyone else."

Despite his misgivings of having a weapon shoved into his hand and being told to fire, there were a _lot_ of things to go over before even coming close to trying to shoot. What the different parts were, how they worked, how to engage the safety, how to pop open the cartridge, how to load rounds, the right way to stand, the right way to position his arms (difficult to do with one arm in a sling), the right way to hold the gun itself, how to judge distance, how to aim, how to lead a target, when _not_ to shoot, and on and on.

And despite his intentions to lead the conversation around towards his intended goal of talking about Mikaela, Sam found himself utterly absorbed in the lesson. Lennox was more than a good commander; he was a good teacher, as well. But as the minutes rolled by like leaves swept downstream, he found himself glancing with increasing frequency at his watch-- 8:24, 8:36, 8:40, 8:43, 8:45. Time was slipping away from him; his window of opprotunity was closing.

Other soldiers, finished with their firearms practice for the day, had started to mill around behind them, watching the lesson as it progressed. Most looked at him questioningly, as though they had not been informed that a teenager would be living with them and were unsure whether to welcome him, haze him, ignore him, or beat him to a pulp. After thirty minutes or so, Epps returned to lean against one wall of the booth, acting as a bouncer. Or as a co-conspirator waiting to snicker at him as the other marines hoisted the waistband of his underwear over his head. Either one.

Sam tried to simply ignore them. While he wasn't shooting at anything, it was relatively easy to pretend that they weren't there, or at least to entertain himself with amusing little daydreams of Optimus squishing anyone who harassed him. But when at last the theory section of the lesson drew to a close, icy fingers of sweat began to trickle down between his shoulder blades. Now everyone would get to see him make a fool of himself trying to shoot straight. Fun times.

At last Lennox took the 22 away from him, clapping a hand against his shoulder blade.

"Good! I think you've got the basics down. If only the rest of the rock heads I have to work with could learn half as fast as you."

At the 'rock head' comment, several boos and catcalls arose from behind them. Without turning his head, Lennox yelled back to them, "Yeah, you know it's true. Keep your thoughts to yourselves-- I'm trying to help a kid here."

"You'll do fine," Epps encouraged, and Sam gave him a wane smile until he added, "Unless you screw up, in which case you won't do fine."

Lennox rolled his eyes at the Sergeant, popping three shells into the 22 he had taken from Sam. "Really not helping, Epps."

"Sorry."

Vaguely aware that he had begun to tremble again and valiantly trying to look tough and unconcerned despite that fact (cut it out, damnit!), Sam took the loaded gun back from Lennox.

"Alright," the Captain said, turning his back on the other soldiers, "Now you're going to practice actually shooting. Set yourself up like a showed you, but wait until I say so to pull the trigger."

Staring at the gun in his hand as he cautiously went through the pre-fire checks he had just been taught, Sam was convinced that in definance of his wishes it would spontaneously go off and put a hole through his foot. The fact that it didn't hardly made him feel better; the way his luck seemed to go, it would probably unleash a bullet in his direction at the exact moment he was winding up his argument to allow Mikaela to come live with him.

"So...I had a question I wanted to ask you," Sam opened casually, finishing off the checks and shifting his feet into the proper positions.

Seeming to ignore him, Lennox instructed, "Lower your arm about two inches and shift your shoulder back some more-- you need to compensate for only having one arm to work with. One of these days," he added, "You're going to have to tell me the story of how you broke that arm. Optimus was rather vague in his report."

"Yeah, well, answer my question and I'll answer yours," Sam retorted, not quite brave enough to look over at Lennox while he spoke.

"You haven't even _asked _a question yet, you only said you had one. --Sight down the end of the barrel at that first target, the one that looks like a mutant tank. Yeah, like that. Good."

Adjusting his aim, Sam moved his finger to hover over the trigger.

"Fine. I'll ask it. But you have to promise not to just blow me off first."

Lennox rolled his eyes, making another minute adjustment to his wavering hand.

"_First _you need to calm down-- you're shaking so much that your aim's going to be shot to hell. And once you're no longer holding a loaded weapon you can ask me any question you want."

"Even if something uber important comes up?"

"Yes, already! We're going to have to work on this not-trusting-people thing of yours. It's really annoying."

"Good." And he pulled the trigger.

His hopes of dramatically punctuating the single word by hitting the bullseye the first time were dashed as the shot went wide and lodged itself into the foam material covering the back wall. Not only did he not hit the bullseye, he missed the target altogether. By almost four feet. _Lame_.

Groans of disappointment rose up behind him (accompanied by a few jeers that Lennox swiftly put down), causing him to redouble his grip on the 22.

"That was okay, that was okay!" Lennox assured him, adjusting his arm again, "With only one arm to brace against the recoil, I'm surprised you didn't hit the ceiling on your first shot. Try it again, but remember to tighten your fist just before you pull the trigger to steady the barrel."

Rolling his shoulders and settling back into his stance, Sam squeezed off a second shot. That time he _did _hit a target, but not the one he was aiming for. It was almost as bad as just hitting the wall. Even Lennox winced, but trying to bolster his confidence against the murmurs behind him, he said, "That was better. You, uh, took out Blackout's toe. A very disabling injury."

"...yeah." It wasn't an agreement.

"Try again. The only way to get better is practice-- _and the next person that groans is going to find themselves short a testicle!_"

But the third shot ended up no better than the two before it. Sam started to wonder if he might accidentally kill Bee himself rather than help him by trying to shoot at an attacking Decepticon. His aim seemed to be just that level of crapptastic that he would probably do better pointing the gun at whoever he _didn't _want to hit-- that way, he could be certain they wouldn't be hurt by an errant bullet.

Not wanting to be the loser who gave up after a few tries, Sam accepted the five additional rounds from Lennox and loaded them into the gun with shaking hands. Why was this so hard? He'd watched eight-year-old little kids shoot better than him, and he had much better reasons than they did for needing to be able to hit what he wanted to hit. Namely, his best friend was fighting a war and he himself was the target of psychotic space robots with dental hygiene problems that wanted to tear him limb from limb (and cut out his brain, let's not forget that). Oh, and if his girlfriend ever got to come live with him he would need to be able to protect her as well, a goal which seemed unlikely given that the only talents he seemed to posses involved running for his life and finding ancient alien artifacts. Neither of which would help much with the protecting thing.

Yet after firing no less than fifteen rounds and only once nicking the target, it was fairly obvious that he was pants at the whole shooting thing. At least _he_ wasn't the one to give up first; Lennox was the one who finally called it quits around 9:15. By that time, most of the gathered crowd had dispersed, no longer interested in watching epic fail after epic fail. Epps still hung around, but probably only to offer moral support for Lennox.

"Alright, I think that's enough for now," the Captain sighed at last. Clenching his jaw, Sam slammed the empty gun back onto the counter and turned to leave, furiously ignoring the tightness around his eyes.

"Thanks for trying to help me," he muttered, curling in on himself a little. He gave a weak little laugh, trying to pretend that the fact that he couldn't even do something as simple as hit a stationary target didn't make him feel as useless as tofu at a sausage convention. "Probably don't want me for your team now, huh?"

Lennox grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around, dark gaze brimming with fury. Sam recoiled slightly, wondering what he had done to piss the man off.

"You," he annunciated clearly, "Are. A. Beginner. You can and _will _learn even if we have to come down here six hours a day to make it happen."

Suddenly, Sam felt himself growing angry in return. "Why? Because Optimus _told _you to?" he sneered.

Lennox pushed him up against the wall-- not hard, but forcefully enough to shake up the black cloud brooding over his head. He brought their faces close together, speaking softly but inexorable. "No, dimwit. Because those robots are kidding themselves if they think they can keep you safe forever, and if they try to imprison you down here, you'll end up as lifeless-- maybe _more _lifeless-- than if a Decepticon pumped you full of lead. Because you and I _both _know there are things out there evil enough to scare the piss out of any hardass, things that want to grind mankind itself into dust under their heels. Because if Prime loses you, we'll lose Prime, and we can't afford for that to happen."

With one hand, Lennox gabbed his jaw and tilted his head up, forcing Sam to look into his eyes. They gleamed with the steel of a keen-edged sword, with an iron will that had taken down scores of Decepticons and brought Starscream himself to his knees. They were the eyes of a man who would be damned if he lost a battle or left a soldier behind, eyes that spoke of a soul both unfathomably powerful and terribly fragile, afraid of its own strength and afraid to lose all that it cared for. "Because," he continued, voice impossibly soft, "there are some things that I cannot teach, things that you have when others don't. Because you're part of my team whether you like it or not, even if you don't have the badge yet."

He pulled back slightly, tapping Sam gently on the cheek bone with two fingers. "So think about _that _before you go getting all moody and whiny on me."

And without another word Lennox released him, turning towards Epps who had looked away as though nothing interesting were occuring. As though his Captain hadn't just claimed another recruit.

Shaking with a dose of adrenaline not born from fear, Sam peeled himself from the wall. He looked from Lennox to the row of guns and back again, not quite certain where his whirling thoughts were taking him but knowing he wouldn't like where he found himself when they got there.

Since the lesson was obviously over, it made sense to jump Lennox with his housing request for Mikaela, especially since the busy Captain might up and disappear at any time. He needed to strike while the iron was hot and while the man was still vulnerable (....vulnerable?).

Yet he knew that he might never get another chance to fire a gun, regardless of Lennox's claim. Things might have been quiet at the moment, but a disquieting ripple of premonition warned him that the Decepticons wouldn't remain in hibernation for long. They would be back, and with a vengeance. When they did, the Captain wouldn't _have _six hours a day to spend talking him through another round of laughably bad marksmanship practice. He needed to find the trick, the key, to work out this problem the way he'd found the trick to driving a car or destroying Allsparks or tripping over a Matrix or two. _Everything _depended on it, not to mention his future as something other than a mascot.

So staring at the row of guns and knowing he was about to do something irrevocably stupid and punishment-worthy, he concentrated on all the reasons he needed to be able to use them with deadly efficiency.

Bumblebee-- his friend, his ally (_and guardian angel_)-- constantly risked his life not only to save Sam, but to save humans in general, the same humans that had hurt him so (--_clawing, screaming-- hoses pouring out ice, drowning him in ice-- hands chained behind a concrete slab, knives cutting into yellow armor-- BEE!!-_-). The alien had done everything for him, risked everything for him, come running whenever he called (--_a yellow blur exploding from the garage, and then Bee was there, Bee was shooting the tiny robots chasing after them-- chains smashing down into the sand, striking out at them, and then Bee was there, Bee was crushing the monster's head and tearing the metal panther in half, pulling out its spine while Sam lay at his feet, Sam lay staring up at his avenging angel, optics the blue of defiance, a shining shield against the whole _universe--).

And now Bee might have been in danger. Bee went out there every day to fight Decepticons, and all Sam could do was sit on his hands and hope that he was okay. He couldn't fight-- he couldn't rip out a big ass gun and blow up the reaching, clawing hands trying to tear his angel apart-- he couldn't do anything to help him.....not even keep him company _(--'I don't _want _you to come with me'--)._

Optimus wanted him to stay where it was safe. His parents wanted him to stay where it was safe. Mikaela wanted him to stay where it was safe. Bee was in danger, and everyone wanted him to stay where it was safe.

He stared at the gun.

Well fuck that!

Before Lennox had the chance to yell for him to stop, Sam darted forward and snatched up one of the guns he knew to still be loaded (--_Bee fighting, dying, no one to help him_--). He turned his back to the shooting lane, pointing the barrel towards the ceiling and cocking the gun (I want to do this, _I need to do this_, I'M GOING TO DO THIS!). Take a deep breath, eyes narrowing, muscles clenching like stone (--_Bee, no!--)._

Someone might have shouted his name, but he couldn't hear them. There was a roaring, rushing sound in his ears, in his chest--

**INITIALIZING CONNECTION PROGRAM**

**--**and with a sharp, inarticulate cry, he flung himself around, brought up the gun, and took aim.

Six targets, six rounds.

Time didn't slow, but suddenly he could cram hours worth of thought into every fraction of a second--

**CONNECTION ESTABILISH. DOWNLOADING TARGETING PROTOCOLS**.

--he found himself drifting, hand moving to thought alone instead of needing specific commands. And suddenly he knew exactly where to aim the gun, how many pounds per square inch of pressure were needed to depress the trigger, what degree angle he needed to counter air drag and the slight downward curve caused by gravity (less than a fraction of a millimeter).

Six targets, six rounds loaded into the gun.

In less than three seconds he squeezed off six shots. No hesitation, no doubt that he would miss. Just aim, shoot, aim and shoot again.

The instant the last round left the barrel, Sam tumbled back into his own body like a snapped rubber band. The fog cleared-- time resumed its normal flow. He stumbled, every limb suddenly weighing a thousand pounds, every sense suddenly awakened to the starkness of preception-- the light burned too brightly, the scent of gunpowder seared in his nostrils, the grumbling echo of his own shots clanged in his ears, the bitter taste of bile made him want to gag, the floor was too hard, the gun too heavy, his clothes too scratchy.

He stumbled back another step, shaking his head (...what just happened?), and nearly dropped the gun. Calloused fingers snagged his wrist as his trembling forearm muscles relaxed their grip, tearing the gun from his hand. A voice shouted in his ear-- Lennox, he realized. Made sense, really, given that the face leaning in towards him was Lennox's.

"--What they hell are you doing?!" The man roared, slamming the emptied gun back onto the counter, "I thought I told you to _never _discharge a weapon unsupervised unless I say you can!"

Epps shouldered in between them, looking not towards Sam or even the enraged Captain, but out at the six targets.

"Will," he interrupted, voice full of awe and disbelief, pulling Lennox around by the back of his t-shirt to face down the shooting lane, "I think you should see this."

"See what?"

But then he stopped, staring as Epps did, mouth dropping open into a bemused crescent.

"_Holy shit_," he whispered emphatically.

Attracted by the sound of rapid-fire shots and shouting voices, other soldiers gathered around behind them in the booth, gazing down the firing lane to the six targets. Those who had earlier witnessed Sam's disasterous attempts to wield the 22 could only gaze, stunned, at the evidence of his hypnotic rampage.

Shaking his head again and stumbling back into the wall, Sam cradled his broken arm in its blue sling to his chest, wondering just how much destruction he had caused. And how much it would cost to fix it. He just hoped he hadn't hurt someone while caught helplessly in the trance that had come over him (--_not normal, not _human--_no way I could have known those things_--).

He didn't want to look. Dreaded doing so, even. But against his will he found his eyes drawn down the shooting lane, gaze sliding over the concrete-- two yards, three, four-- until the six targets arranged at the end came into view.

At first his brow furrowed in puzzlement. Where were the exploded chunks of concrete? Where were the fallen targets and bleeding limbs of innocent bystanders?

But then, examining the targets themselves in detail, he noticed the small black holes in each. Six targets, six holes-- each one cutting through the dead center of the bullseye.

All the air vanished from his lungs.

"Damn," someone breathed in awe. Sam heartily concurred.

Lennox turned slowly to face him. "Sam, what--"

Suddenly, a piercing wail blared through the room, its oscillating screech drowning out even the boom of Ironhide's cannons. Lennox, Epps, and the rest of the NEST soldiers froze; the continual firing of guns abruptly ceased as though switched off. For a moment, everyone stood in a stunned silence, listening to the mechanical howl that filled every crevasse and seemed to emanate from the ceiling itself. But then a crystal clear voice began to speak over an intercomm of sorts, the words perfectly audible yet making as much sense to Sam as strings of gibberish, and the soldiers leapt into action.

As burly marines began to scramble in every direction-- their faces ashen and lined with tension-- it dawned on Sam that the wailing noise was an alarm of some sorts.

His heart drummed against his ribs, chugging as fast as when he had run from Megatron. He watched with wide eyes as Epps yelled something to Lennox, clapped a hand to his arm, and sprinted away.

"What is it? Are we under attack?" he croaked.

Shouldering past him, Lennox snatched up one of the guns, checked its magazine, and tucked it into the waistband of his pants. Though Sam didn't think he could hear his frightened whisper over the din, the Captain replied, "No. Nothing's wrong _here_. Everywhere else is a different story. Stay on base-- whatever you do, don't try to leave."

"Wait!" he cried as Lennox turned away, lunging after him and latching on to his sleeve (--_no time, do it _now--). "You promised to answer my question!"

The Captain swore, jerking away. "Not now! The Decepticons are attacking all over the world, and unless we do something a lot of people are going to die!"

_Mikeala_.

Sam darted in front of him, blocking his exit, and drew himself up as proud and strong as an eighteen-year-old in a cast could be. Mikeala was out there somewhere, maybe in the path of a rampaging Decepticon. Mikeala was in danger. Mikaela, Mikaela, _Mikaela_--

"Can Mikaela come live here with me?"

Lennox stopped in the middle of brushing past him, thrown off balance by the unexpected question.

"_What_?" he asked in disbelief and irritation.

Furiously pressing his case, determined not to be rebuffed, he began speaking rapidly in a clipped, utterly serious voice. "If everyone else in the world but NEST is in danger, my girlfriend is in danger. She helped destroy Megatron and bring Optimus back to life. Heck, she helped bring _me _back to life. You wanna keep me from becoming lifeless? Well if she dies because security procedures were too important to keep her from coming here, you won't have to worry about Decepticons or imprisonment making me lifeless. So I'm asking you--" he swallowed, "--no, I'm begging you: give my girlfriend the clearance to come live here with me. Please. Please."

Lennox stared at him hard for a long moment while the alarm continued to screech, dark eyes unreadable. At last he said, "You think I should drop everything to try to save one person? You think her life is worth more than thousands of others?"

Sam kept his eyes wide, resisting the temptation to squeeze them shut. His hands tried to shake-- he wouldn't let them. Just like with Bumblebee, he was an awful, evil monster, even more so than the Decepticons. But he couldn't deny the truth, not even to himself.

"Yes."

Glancing swiftly around, Lennox fisted one hand in the front of his shirt and dragged him back into the shooting booth. Sam expected the Captain to reem him out, curse him from on high from being so vile and selfish.

Instead he asked in an urgent whisper, "Do you love her?"

Sam could only stare at him. Why wasn't he yelling and screaming?

"Yeah, of course I do--"

"How much do you love her?"

"I-I," he choked, fumbling around for an answer. He didn't think 'alot' would be a good one. But how could he define something that defined him? "She's-- well, she's Mikaela. She's my girlfriend."

"But do you love her?"

"Yes, I told you that!"

"Then say it!"

Sam could only stare at him, and Lennox shook him by the front of his shirt. "Do. You. Love. Her?"

"_Yes! _Yes, I love her!" He cried, "I don't know how I'm supposed to _live _without her! I'd rather all those people _burn _than have her die! I love her,_ I love her_, I LOVE HER! How many times do you want me to say it?!"

"Until you mean it!"

"But I do--"

"Until you mean it. Until you're enough of an adult and a man to _prove it to her_."

(--_Mikaela dead dead dead, lying in a pool of blood_--). "How?" he whispered, voice breaking.

Lennox tapped his cheek again, the gesture seeming somehow conspirital. Though his face bore an ashen hue and his mouth drew itself into a tight line, there was a spark of warm affection and something like amusement deep in the pools of his eyes. His voice dropped, becoming low and furtive, insistent.

"Army Command Policy for general personnel, section 4, subsection 18, paragraph A-- The spouse of a soldier cannot be barred from living at the place of the soldier's deployment."

"Soldier? But I'm not--"

Lennox shook him again, continuing without pause, "Geneva Convention II Accords, article 5, section 13, paragraph C-- the spouse of an ambassador to a foreign nation or government posseses the right to accompany the ambassador to his or her place of residence in any foreign nation and _will be granted the same diplomatic immunity awarded to the ambassador_."

Time stopped, and the world inverted on its axis. He may not have been a solider in the US army, but according to Optimus he _was _an ambassador of sorts. He was an ambassador-- _an ambassador_--

Somewhere far above his head, Decepticons were wreaking havoc on mankind, their presence heralded by the continual wail of the base-wide alarm. But Sam could only stare up at Lennox, staring at him but not really seeing him, numb with shock and swept away by the power of revelation that had come over him.

Scarcely three weeks ago, he had been bound and determined never to say 'I love you' to Mikaela until and unless she said it first. She was hot; she had options. He had to do something to keep her interested, keep her coming back for more. But that was three weeks ago, and now Sam was three weeks older and centuries wiser.

He thought of all those soldiers running out to try to stop the Decepticons, about how many of them had families and little children that might never see them again. He thought about Bee, about how the scout might die before they could patch things up, before he had the chance to tell him how much he loved-- yes, _loved_-- him.

And he thought about Jolt-- thought about the blue Autobot alone in the twisted metal graveyard, trying and failing and trying again to bring the dead back to life (--_a wail of unearthly anguish_--), thought about the bond he had been too scared to complete and had forever lost the chance to know when death came knocking at the door. And he realized-- piercingly, suddenly-- that life was too short, too fleeting, too brutal, not to tell someone you loved them if you did. Especially since you might never again have the chance.

Flooded and electrified with a burning sense of purpose (--_standing on the ceiling, the bottom of the world, seeing the universe upsidedown_--), he pulled away from Lennox and looked down at the sling around his arm. Only an hour before, he had been terrified to lose his one last connection to Mikaela. Now, set on a path from which there was no turning back, he was terrified of _needing _to never look at it.

His whole body pulsing in time with his heart beat, every nerve lit up like a live wire, he slipped the blue strap over his head and ripped the sling away from his cast, letting it flutter to the floor. Twisting his arm to bring the curling words inked across the plaster into the light, he soaked up the message his girlfriend had somehow known he would not be ready to see until that exact moment.

_When you finally have the guts to say it first, my answer is 'yes'._

_Love always and forever more,_

_Mikeala._

_(Please ask before I turn sixty. I want to look good on my wedding night)_

Sam slowly glanced up at Lennox, catching the slight smile on the army Captain's face and wondering dizzily what his own expression looked like.

"I'm going to ask my girlfriend to marry me," he said, the statement emerging as a bemused question. But even as he spoke the words, he realized that it wasn't a question at all.

Reaching forward and quickly tousling his hair, Lennox shoved him roughly from the booth and towards the door.

"'Bout time you figured it out! Go_, hurry!_"

Sam never looked back as he sprinted through the exit in the opposite wall of the shooting range, running as fast as he had ever run before, faster even than when he had tried to keep the Allspark from Megatron.

This time, he had an even greater monster to outrun. And death was known for being very quick indeed.

_I'm going to marry Mikaela!_

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Buzzing with the frenzied crush of activity seen only in newsrooms and secret military installations when the end of the world loomed imminent, the command center was hardly the ideal place to seek out an open telephone. But it was the closest place he could be certain of finding one, so he threw himself head first into the mayhem.

Soliders, techies, agents and even a few robotic drones dashed back and forth, all shouting and planning and carrying messages and examining data feeds. The roar of sound created by several dozen people all experiencing varying degrees of panic could have competed with Ironhide's cannons for highest decibal level. Phones rang. Keys clacked. Voices shouted. Alarm screamed. Computers whirred.

At any other time, Sam might have felt more concerned at the possibility of a Decepticon-led armageddon. But at the moment, he couldn't think of anything beyond the possibility that Mikaela might die before he could tell her that he wanted her to be his wife. _Wife_. A concept that should have been utterly alien to any teenager. Then again, Sam had been living with things that were 'alien' every day for nearly two years, so he supposed the thought of getting married wasn't all that out there.

He had a plan. It was brilliant, if a little sparse.

Step one-- Find a phone. Easier said than done.

Step two-- Call Mikaela, ask her hand in marriage. Possibly harder than step one.

Step three-- Marry Mikaela and bring her back to NEST where she would be safe from the descending hordes of Decepticons. And if NEST wasn't safe, then at least they would die married.

Simple. Straightforward. And completely useless if he couldn't secure a land line for more than three minutes. But if need be, he was fully willing to mud wrestle for one.

Every person that he spotted with a phone to their ear he approached, tapped on the shoulder, and shouted over the din to ask if he could borrow it. Most people ignored him, and those that did turn speared him with incredulous glares and then went back to whatever they had been doing in the first place.

Just when he started to wonder if he would actually need to wrestle a phone away from someone, Dave showed up and yanked him away from the techie he was in the process of hassling (and looming over, though all his attempts at intimdation had so far failed).

"What are you _doing _in here?" the agent shouted above the noise, dragging him out into the hallway where there were slightly less people crowding around them on all sides. "Seventeen simultaneous Decepticon attacks are currently underway, and two more pop up every minute! You need to stay out of their way, Sam."

Sam tried to brush him off, straining back towards the command center. "Need a phone," he panted in explanation.

Dave shook his head, sighing explosively, and grasped his upper arm to drag him further down the hallway.

"Bumblebee is fine," he soothed, voice haggard, "But right now, Optimus needs for you to let everyone do their job--"

"_Screw Optimus!" _Sam tore himself away from the agent and turned to face him, only just realizing how tensely wound he was. "My girlfriend is out there where those seventeen-plus Decepticon attacks are taking place--"

"There is nothing you can do to help her, Sam. Attempting to get to her is foolhardy and suicidal--"

"I'm not trying to '_get to her'_! I'm trying to bring her down here, to NEST!"

"Sam, no matter our own personal feelings we have to obey regulations--"

"_Stuff your regulations!_ I have a regulation for you-- how does the Geneva Convention II accords sound? Article 5, subsection C, something like that, says that the spouse of an ambassador has the right to live wherever the ambassador lives! Okay, well according to _Optimus _I AM an ambassador, and if I can get a phone for five minutes, she's going to be my _wife_!"

The pressure on his arm disappeared as Dave's hand fell away. The agent turned to regard him with open shock, hopefully taking in all the many things implied by the murderously serious game-face Sam wore. Apparently he did, because his face paled to alabaster white, skin as ashen as the soldiers' before running out to dance the deadly dance.

"...You want to propose?" He asked when he finally rediscovered his voice.

"Um, _yeah_. That's kinda what 'going to be my wife' implies. So if you'll excuse me..."

Sam turned back towards the command center again. When a hand once more hooked itself under his elbow to halt his stride, he seriously considered whirling around and socking the agent as hard as he could in the jaw. But somehow he resisted. Hooray for self-restaint under fire!

"Sam...." the agent trailed off, searching his face. What he hoped to find Sam couldn't guess. "....you love her?"

Sam exhaled explosively, the sound caught somewhere between a sigh of exasperation and a giggle of boiling fury brought about by the inherent irony of the universe. "_God_, this again?! _Yes_. I love her. Okay?....What?" he asked suspiciously when an expression strangely like pain flashed across Dave's face. "_What_?"

The agent swore under his breath, releasing Sam's arm to run his fingers through his hair. If he hadn't seen other authority figures break down in a similar manner, seeing Dave's reaction might have caused his universe to come unglued.

Seeming to come to a decision, he closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"I'm going to get fired for this," he muttered. Then, eyes snapping open, he herded Sam back towards the command room, possesed of a dire new purpose. "Scratch that-- fired and _blackballed_."

"Optimus wouldn't do that," Sam denied, heart racing at the dangerous undercurrent to the agent's words. But not with fear-- with excitement. Whenever by-the-book adults prepared to do something they thought either a) immoral, b) illegal, or c) likely to get them fired, it usually was a step in the right direction for the greater good. In this case, a step towards putting him in contact with Mikaela.

"Don't be so sure," Dave answered darkly. Then, pulling Sam against a wall out of the way, he scanned the room while speaking in an urgent voice. "If you really want to do this, we only have about twenty minutes to get a call through before her plane leaves for America."

Sam went rigid with shock.

"But I thought her flight wasn't until later! I thought I had more _time_!" he protested.

Dave nodded, gaze sharpening to a diamond hard glint as he spotted what he had been searching for. Tugging Sam farther into the command room, he spoke over his shoulder, "You did until about 6:30 this morning. An agent assigned to protect her made the recommendation that both she and your parents fly out earlier rather than later to avoid a massive storm system moving in from the Indian Ocean."

Sam wanted to stomp his feet and scream that it wasn't fair. He wanted to throw a temper-tantrum to put a two-year-old to shame (--_only twenty minutes, oh God, only twenty minutes_--), but he rejected the impulse as Dave came up behind a frazzled-looking techie jabbering rapidly into a phone in something that sounded like Russian.

Dave tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me."

The techie jerked and looked up, glasses askew on the bridge of his nose, and glared at the agent, seemingly oblivious to his feral grin. "Excuse _you_. In case you couldn't tell, I'm rather busy here-- hey!" he yelped in protest as Dave abruptly snatched the reciever from his hand and held it to his ear. Without the slightest hint of discomfort, the agent immediately began to speak in flawless Russian to whoever was listening on the other end of the line, smiling at times and even barking a laugh at one point. When he finished the conversation with a warm Russian farewell, he reached over top of the techie and dropped the reciever back into its cradle.

"The water table under the counties surrounding Moscow has remained at its usual level for the past five months and is highly unlikely to be contaminated by a Decepticon attack unless they dig a three hundred foot trench and dump toxic waste into the ground," he informed the techie cheerfully. "Now that that has been taken care of, would you be so kind as to allow us the use of your phone for the next few minutes?"

The poor gobsmacked techie could only gape at the agent looming over the back of his chair in a very impressive and intimidating manner. "B-but I have other calls to make!"

"Let me rephrase that-- _take a coffee break_."

Not daring to pretend to misunderstand a man who carried a loaded gun, could speak unaccented Russian, and looked impeccable in a suit, the techie scrambled from his desk and hurried away.

Sam dropped into the vacated chair, reaching for the phone. A hand stilled his, and with an apologetic glance Dave reached with his other arm to pick up the reciever.

"Let me make the call, Sam. If they're following procedure, the agents with Mikaela will have taken her phone to screen any incoming calls. You're likely to alienate them in your current state, which would go a long way towards ensuring that we never get ahold of her."

Reluctantly surrendering the phone, Sam leaned back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest. The fingers of his good hand dug themselves into the meat of his bicep. He watched as Dave dialed in a number, holding his breath as the cellphone on the other end began to ring.

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An airport in India, Mikaela discovered, was very much like an airport in America. Except possibly even more crowded.

Seated in a plastic chair before a gate sectioned off for private aircraft, she gazed around at the milling throngs, wondering how they could breathe packed in so close together. The powerful odor of frying food wafted thickly through the air, mouth-watering at first but later sickening when it settled onto her skin, her hair, in a greasy layer that was almost tangible.

But the nausea itself might have been easier to bear if a certain rambling, stupidly heroic, utterly adorable boy were sitting beside her clasping her hand. As cheesy as it sounded, Sam had no idea just how much Mikaela relied on him for her own strength. Pretty pathetic, right? A girl-power, butt-kicking, stiletto-wearing warrior goddess shouldn't swoon when a man smiled at her or brought her flowers. But over the past two years she had fallen and fallen hard. Sure, Sam could be dorky at times, but what people didn't know was that he was also brave, sensitive, selfless, and ridiculously loving. God, she had almost broken down blubbering all over him when he arrived on her doorstep one day while she was sick with the flu-- his knees covered with grass stains, hair mussed, face pulled up in a crooked smile-- holding out a fragile bouquet of wild daisies he'd picked for her to make her feel better, since all the flower stores had closed.

She'd dated countless hot guys with big trucks, big arms and big egos, but somehow none of them could compare to Sam. Because, among other reasons, not a single one of them had ever gone and picked flowers for her. Sure, some of them had bought her two dozen perfect roses for her birthday or Valentine's day, but it was easy to have a florist deliver roses when you had a fat wallet. Not one of them would have been brave enough to run from Megatron and destroy the Allspark. Not one of them could have journeyed through the desert to bring Optimus back to life. Not one of them would spend the time to get down on their knees and pluck a few scraggly wild flowers when there were no roses to be found. Sam was like those daises, in a way-- maybe not a girl's first pick, but infinitely more valuable because of the heart and love behind them.

And above all, not one of the other guys she had met-- or knew she would ever meet-- could hold her leathery heart in his hand and melt it like butter.

She wished with every fiber of her being that he could be sitting beside her in those icky plastic seats, more than ready to jump on a plane back to America and forever leave the terror of the past week behind. But if he did come back with her, he would surely be killed. As screwed up as it was, the only choice he had was to remain with the Autobots. Forever.

Yet as the flat screen TV's mouted to the ceiling began to light up with newsflash reports from around the world, she realized that even staying with the Autobots might not provide a safe haven for Sam. Most of the news reporters spoke in languages besides English, but after a few minutes of frantic searching (and several shouts from the agents guarding her to stay put), she finally found a channel playing CNN.

_"--over nineteen major cities around the world are under attack by the same metal creatures seen a little over ten days ago before the destruction of one of the pyramids of Giza. No threats or messages have been issued by the invaders, but most assume that these new attacks are directly related to the ongoing search for Samuel James Witwicky, last seen--"_

"Miss Banes," a suited agent grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the TV, back towards the partitioned area where the other guards and Sam's parents were waiting, "For your safety, we need you to stay close. We will be boarding the plane in just a few minutes."

Mikaela jumped as the agent's pocket began to ring.

_"R. E. S. P. E. C. T! Tell ya what it means to me--"_

Her phone!

Propelling her back towards the plastic chair, the agent pulled the buzzing device from an inner pocket of his jacket, flipping it open and scowling at the caller ID.

"Who is it?" She asked, heart leaping beneath her ribs.

"Headquarters. Probably calling to tell us what we already know--"

As he pressed the talk button and moved to bring the speaker to his ear, Mikaela leapt forward and snatched it from his hands. Only one person would be calling her phone from NEST: _Sam_.

"What is it? Are you okay? Have you heard about what's going on?" She rushed out before the phone was even in position against her face, holding out a hand to forestall the agent trying to snatch it back from her.

_"Is this Mikaela?"_

Her heart plummeted-- the voice on the other end definitely wasn't Sam's. Too old, too confident, baffled at hearing her voice instead of an agent's.

"Y-yes....?"

_"Hold on. Let me put Sam on."_

There was a rustling noise in the background, a crackle of fabric as the handset was transfered, and then the sweetest sound in the whole world tickled her ear through the speaker.

_"Mikeala?"_

She swallowed, smiling in confused elation.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm here. Are you okay Sam? Is everything alright there?"

_"Everything's fine, Mikaela, don't worry. Your strong man is as safe, sound and burly as ever."_

"Talking about Lennox?" she asked with a weak little laugh.

_"Ha ha. Very funny."_

::Attention all passengers of flight 234, service to JFK international airport. We will now begin boarding all loading zones. Please make your way to the gate and have your ticket ready::

_"Mikeala?" _the tiny voice coming through the phone called to her when she didn't answer. Throat closing in alarm, she spun around to see the other the suited agents begin to marshall Sam's parents towards the door out onto the runway. The countdown had reached zero; they were out of time.

_"Mikeala?" _Sam called again, fearful.

The agent beside her reached for the phone. "Miss Banes, we need to leave. _Now_, before the airports shut down."

She recoiled away from him, scrabbling around for some reason, any reason, to justify lingering for a minute longer. But for once luck seemed to be one their side-- a tourist couple approached the agent and began to speak in rapid french, holding out a thick wad of bills. Apparently, the agents themselves weren't the only ones desperate to get out before the world's airports shut down.

Seizing the opprotunity presented by the agent's momentary distraction, Mikaela ducked under his arm and dashed for the sheltering camouflage of the teeming crowd. Several voices shouted for her to stop, but she ignored them all, plunging into the raging tide of people.

"I'm here, Sam!" she yelled breathlessly into the mouth piece. "Whatever you want to say, you're going to have to say it fast-- the plane's leaving, like, _now_!"

Sam cursed on the other end of the line, the words muffled by distance. But then he must have brought the phone back to his ear, because when he began speaking tightly, urgently, his voice emerged crystal clear.

_"I think I found a way for you to come stay with me at NEST. You still want to, right?"_

"Yes! I hope you've figured that out by now!"

_"I have. And that's the only thing that's giving me the guts to say this." _He paused.

Mikaela slowed to a halt and glanced around through the streaming bodies, spying an alcove by a trashcan and slipping into it. It was awkward to hold the phone with her elbows tucked in tightly to her rib cage, but somehow she managed it.

"Say what? Sam, you're not making any sense."

More muffled cursing. _"Yeah, I know. Give a guy a break, will you? I haven't had the chance to practice this a zillion times in front of a mirror."_

Her breath caught in her chest. She couldn't speak. _Sam_.

_"Mikaela," _he paused, breath heavy yet measured on the other end. She heard him gulp. _"You were right. I was being stupid. Totally, utterly, unforgivably stupid. B-but I've learned from my mistakes, and now I'm enough of a man to know that you're not just going to run off when I say it. So Mikaela? I love you."_

She began to giggle happy, hysterical giggles, moisture gathering in her eyes. She pressed her knucles to her lips, holding back a rising tide of emotion.

_"I love you so much I sometimes think I'm going to burst. I don't know what to do with myself when you're not around. Nothing seems to be as much fun when you're not there to do it with me. I-I can't sleep sometimes at night because your face is so bright in my mind like the sun, and then I wake up still thinking about you, wanting to call you at six in the morning and tell you that I thought about you all night."_

Another pause. The crowds raged outside her little hideaway, some excited, some frightened, some harried and boiling with terrified fury. The scent of rotten garbage from the trashcan besider her made her want to gag. All around the world, buildings were falling and people were dying while evil alien monsters went on a bloody rampage. But despite all that, she couldn't remember ever feeling so happy, so full of light.

_"You're probably the only person in the world that could put up with my weirdness and put up with being chased by robotic aliens and still love me the next day. Yeah, that's right. I said 'love'. I think I've finally gotten it through my thick skull that you do love me, and that's just....wow. Wow. You may think I'm being corny and completely unoriginal when I say this, but it's true for me so I'm going to say it anyway. Mikaela, if you're not an angel then I don't know what is. When I look at you....when I look at you, when I see your face in my mind, it's like looking at _God_." _His voice broke, _"So I'm going to do something totally uncool and stuffy and cliched and ask--" _He took a deep breath,_ "Mikaela? Will you marry me?"_

Tears streamed down her face. She bit down on one knuckle, crying and laughing all at the same time.

"Y-you dork, you shouldn't even have to ask-- YES! Yes, I'll marry you! God, I was thinking about proposing myself if you didn't get around to it. Yes, yes, _yes_!"

Sam laughed nervously on the other end. _"Whew, that's a relief. Cause see, there's this loophole to go along with me being an ambassador of sorts to the Autobots-- my 'spouse' gets to come with me. So all we need to do is make you my spouse and you can come live with me!"_

Suddenly nervous once more, she peered around the edge of the alcove, watching for the agents she knew would come striding into view at any moment looking for her.

"Great plan, except for one problem."

_"...What?"_

"We have to actually _get married _for me to be your spouse, and seeing as how the Decepticons are in the middle of trying to bring civilization to its knees and we're in two different places, I don't see how we're going to pull off a wedding before someone catches me and shoves me on a plane back to America!"

There was a long pause on the other end, interrupted only by cracking static and the distant sound of ringing phones, shouting voices, and rustling bodies. "Sam?"

_"Can you find a way out of the airport without hanging up? We need to buy ourselves about ten minutes."_

"Why? Sam, what are you planning?"

Seeing the first suited agent shoulder his way through the curtain of people, she slipped from her hiding place and melted back into the crowd, crouching low and darting as fast as she could away from the gates without drawing attention to herself.

Another crackle of static, followed by a weak laugh. _"I think we're about to break some sort of record by becoming the first couple to be married over the phone by an alien."_

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For a long moment after he had popped the question, Sam could only gaze sightlessly at the crowded desk in front of him, completely unable to breathe. Mikaela had said yes. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. It took too much effort to try to wrap his brain around the concept of being a _husband _and having a _wife_, so he didn't try to.

But then his ephemeral little bubble of stunned happiness had popped on the sharp point of reality. Though he hadn't thought quite so far ahead in his plan yet, Mikeala was right-- they had to acutally _get married _for his plan to work. And like she said, the odds were very much against that happening.

His whole plan-- his whole world-- hung suspended by a fragile little thread that continued to fray with every moment he wasted trying to think of a way to get them both to a church of some kind so they could get married. No matter which angle he examined the problem from, he couldn't find a solution that wouldn't leave either of them dead or wanted for murder.

Mikaela was in danger above ground.

To get her out of danger, he needed to bring her below ground to NEST.

To make it so on one could kick up a fuss about her coming to NEST, he needed her to be his wife.

And to make her his wife, they needed to get married. Which they couldn't. They had no time, and no way to get to someone who could marry them--

Suddenly he froze, memories of a long-forgotten conversation with his parents rising in his mind. Unlike most couples he could think of, his parents had been married in a courthouse by a judge rather than in a church by a preist. And if he wasn't deluding himself, he also remembered something about the captain of a ship also being able to preside over a wedding.

When the answer came to him, it was so stunning in its simplicity that he just knew the slightest thing would foul it up. But he had to try. There was no other way (--_no time_--).

Holding the phone to his shoulder, he stood up on his chair, cupped one hand to his mouth, and yelled as loud as he could into the deafening ruckus of the command room, "HEY! IS ANYONE HERE AN ORDAINED PREIST, A JUDGE, OR THE CAPTAIN OF A SHIP?!"

Over a dozen heads swiveled in his direction, fingers pausing over keyboards, soldiers halting in mid-stride, conversations grinding to a halt. Dave slapped a hand over his face and groaned, but didn't try to pull him back down.

"YEAH, I NEED SOMEONE TO MARRY ME AND MY GIRLFRIEND OVER THE PHONE. ANY TAKERS?"

"I might be able to help," someone called from the doorway. Sam whipped around to find Jolt peering around the corner, his optics-- both blue and green-- shining with an earnest light.

"Jolt?" Sam asked in confusion as the electric blue Autobot sidled through the doorway and picked his way over to them. "Are you....a preist or something?"

An alien whirl of laughter answered his hesitant guess as Jolt crouched low beside them. How could he seem so open and carefree when just the night before he had sobbed his metal heart out over the loss of his soulmate?

"No, thank Primus. But I am, technically, the captain of a ship."

_"Sam?" _Mikaela's tiny voice called from the speaker pressed against his shirt. His heart raced. He was so close, so close to a solution-- he couldn't spare a single moment to respond to the timid call, couldn't tear his eyes from Jolt (--_a sound that embodied the agony of the soul_--).

"Technically? How?"

Jolt clicked his fingers against his chin in a parody of the pensive human gesture. "Well, I was third in the chain of command on one of Prime's smaller warships-- not the _Ark_, I don't think I could handle being the de-facto captain of the _Ark_-- and now that the ship's original captain and first mate have both been deactivated, I suppose that makes me the Captain."

_Yes!_

"Jolt," he said, reeling in his enthusiasm, "I don't really have time to explain all the details right now, but would you be willing to marry me and Mikaela?"

The blue Autobot pulled back, shying away, clearly disturbed by the request.

"Sorry, Sam. I don't know how to do a human bonding ceremony. Maybe you could find someone else-"

"There is no one else!" Sam cut across him, "And we don't have time to go find someone. Please, Jolt. This is really important."

Blue and green gazed at him heavily, sifting down to his soul, for a sliver of an instant exposing the gaping maw of bottomless sorrow beneath the carefree facade.

"I want to-to form a spark bond with Mikaela," he explained quietly, noticing an infinitessimal twitch shiver through the powerful metal frame at his words, "Please. I may not get another chance." He captured the Autobot's gaze in his own, refusing to release him from his pleading, determined stare. "Help me save her."

The moment stretched and held-- an eternity of indecision, spiraling outward onto the edge of time, icy dread pooling in his stomach and flooding outwards, creeping farther into his soul with every second those optics gazed through him without answer.

_"Sam?"_

Whether hearing Mikaela's voice or reaching some sort of conclusion through the unknowable processes of his alien mind, Jolt suddenly shifted his stance, that wavering part of him hardening into stone. His optics flared with a brilliant light, and he brought his head close to Sam's, the guileless mask dropping away to reveal a side of the Autobot he had never seen or even imagined. Stronger than the metal of his body, the steel of his soul gleamed with a razor edge as the veil faded away, motionless and unthreatening yet whispering of a bottomless well of power that could be brought to bear against anything in its way.

"I will," he promised, and as with Optimus Sam knew that it was a vow that would not be broken, "What do you want me to do?"

Sam lifted the reciever from his shoulder, tying down the fear and excitement that writhed with equal measure just beneath his skin.

"Can you find a way out of the airport without hanging up?" he asked of Mikaela, "We need to buy ourselves about ten minutes."

_"Why? Sam, what are you planning?" _

Despite himself, a fierce grin stretched across his face as he looked up at the waiting Autobot. Jolt nodded slowly. He couldn't help it-- he laughed. What he was doing must have been illegal. But at the moment, he didn't give a shit.

"I think we're about to break some sort of record by becoming the first couple to be married over the phone by an alien."

He set the phone back on his shoulder and spoke to Jolt. "Alright, I'm not really sure how the speech is supposed to go, so we're going to have to wing it. Just come up with a vow or something for us to both say 'I do' to."

But Jolt shook his head. "I think you will need to devise the vows yourself, Sam. I really don't know much of anything about human marital practices."

"Okay, fine. We'll improvise."

Dave stopped him before he could speak into the phone, prying the reciever from his hands and setting it down on the table.

"Hey, what--"

"If you want this to be official and legally binding, you're going to need witnesses." He pressed a button to switch the call to speaker phone. "Mikaela, is there anyone on your end that could serve as a witness?"

_"Um," _she breathed heavily into the reciever. It sounded like she was running. _"Oh, hold on. Let me get the taxi driver."_

"Good." Dave nodded to himself, then lifted his head to scan the room. Several people near them had turned to watch what was going on, attracted by Sam's shouting and the panting voice blaring loudly through the speaker. A solider Sam had never seen before stepped forward, snapping off a crisp salute.

"Private Walker, reporting for duty, sir. I heard you needed some witnesses for a wedding."

"Wait, here!" A female techie called from her desk, leaning to the side to snatch up a blank piece of paper and a pen. "I'll write up the marriage contract. Give me the names of the bride and groom."

Dave gave the woman Sam and Mikaela's names, adding Private Walker and David Schwartz to the list as witnesses.

Sam leaned towards the phone. "Mikaela! How you doing on recruiting the taxi driver?"

A crackle of static, the sound of a door slamming, and a rapid conversation in broken english. "Okay, I got 'em! His name's Hassim Jasmeet!"

"Got it," the techie called, "Whenever you're ready, Jolt."

The blue Autobot slowly drew himself up to his full height, looking down at the humans gathered around his feet. Sam had the sudden urge to giggle and cry and scream and throw a party all at the same time.

This was it. _He was getting married_.

Ohshit.

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Escaping the airport undetained turned out to be easier than Mikaela had originally thought. Dodging the few guards waiting at the extrance to catch her was a piece of cake compared to dodging Decepticons in Egypt. Slipping out through the glass doors she broke into a run, cellphone clutched tightly to the side of her head. She scanned the crawling lines of cars and buses and trucks waiting at the side walk, looking for a taxi. Though there were several sporting a green sign in some language she couldn't read (though green seemed to be universal for 'vacant'), only three of the four drivers she poked her head through the door to talk to could speak english reasonably well.

Climbing into the back seat of fourth taxi, she shoved few twenty dollar bills at the driver and told him to step on it. Then, when told to find a witness for the wedding (her wedding!) she threw another wad of cash at him and asked for his name. Hassim Jasmeet. Exactly the kind of name she wanted the man witnessing her cellular wedding to have.

"Okay, I got 'em!" she shouted breathlessly into the phone, "His name's Hassim Jasmeet!"

Hassim himself snorted at her terrible pronunciation. She graced the back of his seat with an ugly look.

_"Ready Mikeala?"_

She swallowed heavily. Oh God, she was going to be someone's _wife_. "Ready."

Another voice-- one she had never heard before-- came through the phone, and she realized Sam must have set the thing to speaker so they wouldn't have to pass it back and forth. _"I've never done this sort of thing before, but I'll give it my best shot."_

Oh joy. A newbie. But then she remembered Sam's cryptic message (--_an Autobot_--) and covered a gasp with her hand. Then, she giggled. How cool was it that she was going to be the first girl ever to be married via alien?

The robot had no need to clear its throat, of course, but the meaningful pause in its words conveyed the same shift in tone. It was game time.

_"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears--"_

She couldn't help it-- she started snorting with helpless laughter. Luckily, the Autobot either didn't notice or didn't care. The taxi edged its way out of the drop-off lane into the continual stream of traffic, picking up speed.

"--_the five of us-- _six _of us, pardon me, miss Carpenter-- are gathered here today to witness the union of these two sentient bipedal anthropods of opposite sexes in the bond of holy matrimony_--"

"Are you sure dis is a wedding?" The incredulous taxi driver asked, catching on to the Autobot's last few words as she switched her own phone to speaker. He turned off onto the highway; the speedometer climbed from 35 to 45, then to 55. Mikaela ignored him.

_"--At this point, I think it would be better to have you each speak your vows to the other, stating what you desire from your future mate. Ladies first-- Mikaela, you start."_

Her hand clenched spasmodically around the phone; her whole body tensed like a wound spring. What did she want from a husband, from Sam?

"Sam," she warbled, and took a deep breath to steady her voice, "Sam. Do you promise to love me and no one else-- even if I get fat and have a face full of pimples-- hopefully until the day I die?"

_"Not just hopefully, jeez. _Definitely_. Anything else?"_

"I think you're supposed to say 'I do'."

_"Well then, I do. Anything else on your wish list?"_

She thought for a moment. "Do you promise to put the lid down on the toilet after you use the bathroom and do the dishes every other night?"

An awed laugh._ "I do."_

Jolt spoke again, _"Alright Sam, your turn."_

_"Mikeala." _He stopped. For several tense heart beats nothing but silence issued down the line, and a stab of fear shot through her at the thought that the base had been suddenly bombed from the face of the earth, cutting off the call. But then he spoke again, the previous teasing edge gone from his voice. And it occured to her that he was just as nervous as her.

The taxi continued to accelerate: 55, 57, 62, 68.....

_"Do you promise to love me even when you want to hate my guts for taking you away from your old life, even when the weirdness reading is off the scale and the world is collapsing around our ears, even when I tie you to a chair so you can't run after me and get hurt?"_

"I do, I do, and not a chance. We're in this together whether you like it or not, so you might as well get used to the idea of me saving your butt as many times as you save mine."

Pause._ "Then do you promise to not leave your bras lying around and not bitch at me when I'm trying to watch football?"_

A single tear dripped down her cheek and landed in her lap.

"Y-you don't even like football," she sniffed, fit to burst with the whirlwind of different emotions all fighting for dominance under her breastbone.

_"It's the principle of the thing. Do you promise?"_

A solemn whisper, "I do."

Jolt came back on. _"Then by the power invested in me as Captain of the Intrepid, I now declare you man and wife. Play ball!"_

As if on cue, both she and Sam broke down into peals of sobbing giggles (well, sobbing on her part, Sam sounded like he was ready to pass out).

Hassim could only shake his head. "Kids. Always up to some crazyness these days."

Wiping tears from her eyes, Mikaela looked towards him to offer some sort of come back. But her gaze, rather than focusing on the slicked head of hair, drifted instead to a darting shadow in the rearview mirror. There was a truck behind them in the lane to their left, and several dusty cars, but she couldn't see anything that could have caught her attention like that. At least, not at first.

As she studied the reflection of the traffic in the small, rectangular mirror, a sight she had hoped to never see again appeared between two of the cars. A robotic creature the size and shape of a jungle cat sprinted down the highway alongside the traffic, easily keeping pace with the other cars. Its single glaring eye focused on her in the rearview mirror, his mechanical maw dropping open onto a dark hole of curning, ripping, chain saw teeth.

Her arm went limp; the cellphone sagged from her ear to rest against her neck. She couldn't scream to the driver, couldn't draw a breath.

Snarling its death's head grin, the metal nightmare lunged sideways towards the truck and slashed the tires, ripping through connection cables hanging from the undercarriage. Then it slowed, falling back out of sight, its single eyes focused on her in triumphant glee.

It happened in seconds, far too quickly to feel afraid.

The truck screeched, swerving across the road, and hit the car behind them. The force of the impact caused the truck to jack-knife, but it continued to rocket towards the taxi at an unimaginable speed, tires spinnng, tipping forward, a looming monolith of steel, drawing closer until she could hear the protesting wail of its tires lifting from the pavement, of metal dragging along asphalt and throwing up sparks

"...Sam..." she whispered-- a desperate plea, a final prayer.

And still closer the truck came, so close now that it filled the rear-view mirror, its shadow casting the interior of the taxi in the pall of waiting death.

The phone dropped to the floor.

And she screamed.

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Until that moment, Sam thought he had already heard the most terrible sound in the world.

Laughing with his new wife (--_wife!--) _at Jolt's disjointed speech, knees turning to jello and forcing him to collapse back into the chair, he would never have considered that any noise in the galaxy could be more soul-rending than the sound of his voiceless guardian angel shrieking in pain. Not even Jolt's agonized cries had compared.

But not seconds later, he realized he was wrong.

When Mikaela called his name, her voice no more than a faint brush of sound, he wasn't disturbed at first. He had whispered her name plenty of times, and no doubt his new wife was feeling as breathless as he was. Some part of him registered the note of wrongness to the single word, but he didn't have time to mull over it for long before his world shattered into a thousand jagged pieces.

It didn't take much to do the job. Not a wrecking ball, not a sledge hammer, not even a curled fist. Just a sound.

Mikaela screamed.

It wasn't a delicate stage scream or a protesting squeal of laughter. It was a sound of terror beyond imagining, a wordless denial from the human soul.

And not a fraction of a second later, it abruptly cut off with a tremendous crash of things being crushed that were never meant to be crushed, of tearing, twisting metal, shattering fiberglass, hissing static, and then--

Nothing. The line went dead.

The world folded in on itself, shrinking until nothing but the phone existed, all else swallowed up by the black creeping along the edges of his vision. Yet even the phone itself seemed so far away, as though he were looking at it through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Some part of him remained aware of the sudden hush that had fallen over the little crowd around the phone, rendering them an island of silence in a raging sea of panic. But even the tumultuous noise of the command center itself faded away before the echo of Mikaela's scream resonating in his ears. He stared at the phone as hard as he could, willing her voice to suddenly issue from the speaker and tell him that the taxi had gone through a tunnel or under a bridge or up into outer space for a few moments-- anything to hear her voice as something other than a scream.

But the line didn't reconnect; Mikaela didn't laugh and tell him how silly he was being for getting so worked up.

After a while, the phone began to bleep with the monotonous tone that meant it was off the hook. A hand descened into view-- Dave-- and picked up the reciever, setting it quietly back in its cradle. The bleeping cut off.

Someone was speaking to him, but it could have been Optimus or God or satan for all he cared-- the only voice he wanted to hear was Mikaela's. But the phone was hung up, the phone was hung up and oh god please no something happened to her please don't be dead please please please--

A metal finger brushed lightly down his arm. A word, a name. His name. He didn't answer. He couldn't remember how to speak or even where his mouth was, nothing existed except the phone, not even him. Someone called his name again, a human hand fiercely gripping his shoulder. A different hand lightly touched his back-- a woman's, but not Mikaela's-- trying to urge him from the chair. Did he even have legs? He wasn't sure, but he knew he couldn't stand even if he tried, even if he wanted too, and suddenly the metal hand was on his back and a voice was telling him to breathe, Sam, _breathe_--

A sharp blow struck him between the shoulder blades. He gasped, sputtering, and the world flooded back in, forcing away the black. Sight returned, showing him the ceaseless activity beyond the phone, and his ears rang with the sudden reintroduction of sound, as though he had been living in a trashcan and someone just took off the lid.

Dave's voice spoke over his head. "I've got him, Jolt. Get going, you're already late."

"Be well, Sam," the blue Autobot murmured, the metal hand leaving his back. Without a ripple of sound the alien was gone, robotic feet carrying him from the room with a noiseless grace that no human could ever hope to imitate.

Sam hunched over and gripped the edge of the desk with all his strength, gasping in panicked little wheezes, trying to find his balance so he wouldn't slide from the chair. Everything was too bright, too loud, too painful, and he almost wished the tunneling numbness would return so he wouldn't have to think about Mikaela's screams and the way they had suddenly cut off with a world ending crash powerful enough to destroy her phone and disconnect the call. Because he knew now that it _had _been crushed-- no longer could he fool himself with bright little fantasies that his wife was simply cruising down the world's longest tunnel. The call had ended because her phone had been crushed. And if her phone had been crushed, that meant--

Without being aware of the motion, he shot upright from the chair.

He didn't want to do it. He kicked and screamed and fought himself every inch of the way, but a feral, animal strength he hadn't known he possesed drove him to drag the rest of the thought out into the light. If something had hit the taxi with enough force to instantly destroy her phone, Mikaela might have been very badly hurt. She might even be---

_**NO!**_

--dead.

The room whirled around him again like a carnival ride, and he braced himself once more on the desk even as a set of hands gripped the tops of his arms to keep him upright.

A voice spoke in his ear--

"Come on, Sam. There's nothing more we can do."

--but he furiously ignored it. There _was _something he could do. If Mikaela _was _still alive, there was a very real chance she might not stay that way for long, not if she were very badly injured. Whether from a car crash or a Decepticon attack or a random meteor shower, his wife was in very real danger at that exact moment. This time there was no hesitation and uncertainty like with Bumblebee-- her scream and the following crash were more than enough evidence that she was in trouble. Neither was she a continent away like Bumblebee; she might have been only fifteen miles away.

Although he had no idea what he would do to help her, there was no doubt in his mind that he was going to do whatever he could to bring her back safely.

"Yes, there is," he replied, in a voice not his own. It was too calm, too confident to belong to him. But now that he had a tangible goal in mind, he would willingly rip NEST apart rivet by rivet to achieve it. He was going to find Mikaela.

Straightening again, every atom vibrating like a tuning fork, he turned to address Jolt only to discover that the blue Autobot was no longer there.

"Where'd Jolt go?"

Dave's forehead creased with worry. "He left a few minutes ago, Sam, but I don't think you heard him."

"Whatever. I need to find an Autobot-- or Lennox, either one."

He took a step towards the door, but found himself halted by the tight grip the agent maintained around his arm.

"Let go."

Dave shook his head. "All the Autobots are gone, Sam. Lennox too."

Sam stiffened, then croaked, "They're gone? Where?"

"To investigate the Decepicon attacks. --Sam, I know you're upset, I can understand that, but you need to accept that right now there's nothing we can do--"

"No!" Sam tored himself away. Rather than waste a single moment of time (--every moment a drop of blood, a step towards death--), he wheeled around and sprinted out the door, heedless of the calls behind him.

The Autobots couldn't have left yet. He needed to be on one of those planes! He needed to get off the island!

Though he had only been there once before, his feet carried him unfailingly towards the room with the giant wall of screens. Surely Optimus and everyone else would still be congregated within, listening to a briefing or something. Then when he told them that Mikaela was in mortal danger, they would remember all she had done for them and rush out to find her-- Optimus would lead the way, tracking down the taxi, while Ironhide would follow up with his cannons and blast any attacking Decepticons away from her, and then Rachet would staunch the flow of blood and patch her up good as new. And even if Optimus and the others needed to go stop the Decepticons, Lennox would take pity on him and give him a parachute so he could jump out the back of the cargo plane just as they passed over the place where Mikaela was and he could drift down to her side and hold her in his arms.

But when the door to the cavernous room slid open, revealing the space beyond, his worst fears were realized. It was empty. No scurrying techies (they had all migrated away), no hustling soldiers, no Rachet, no Ironhide, no Optimus, no Lennox. Save for a few crumpled pieces of paper left on the floor and the steady hum of various programs running unsupervised on the computers, the room was as barren as the face of the moon. Panicky, icy dread radiated up into the soles of his feet through the floor, chilling him from the marrow of his bones outwards. No. There had to be a way to find Mikaela. _This couldn't be happening!_

He moved slowly into the room, searching along the ceiling as if to find an Autobot hiding in the rafters. Still nothing. Please no, please no....

"Sam!" Jogging footsteps pounded up behind him. Dave. He didn't turn around.

"I guess you were right," he said dully, "They're gone."

The agent sighed deeply. "I'm sorry, Sam, but right now we simply don't have enough information or man power to help Mikaela. She could be anywhere. And a know you hate to hear this, but it's very possible she's--"

"DON'T SAY IT!" He spun on his heel, hands curling into fists. "She's not! I don't care what your statistics say, she's still alive! And one way or another I'm going to find her!"

Sam tried to brush past the agent, but two strong hands reached out and seized his shoulders, forcing him back.

"And how do you plan to do that? Rub a crystal ball? And if you _could _find her, what would you do when you get there? You're not a medic."

"I would _do _something, not just sit here while she's out there bleeding on the sidewalk! Don't you get it, _she's my wife_!"

Dave opened his mouth to retort, but suddenly Sam wasn't interested in him anymore. His attention was drawn instead to what-- or rather _who_-- had appeared behind the agent. It seemed that not all the Autobots had left; a certain engineer with no real battle capabilities had remained behind. _Wheeljack_.

Rather than speak or otherwise alert the agent to his presence, the spindly alien silently transformed one of his hands into something resembling a pair of calipers, reaching forward and touching them to Dave's temples. Before the agent could even register the light contact, a spark of electricity jumped from one end of the caliper to the other, passing through his skull in the middle.

Jolting slightly, his whole body went immediately limp and he crumpled bonelessly to the ground.

Sam stared down at the agent in shock, then glanced open-mouthed at the timidly crouching engineer.

"Did you...? Is he...?"

The Autobot caught the direction of his thoughts and shook his head, taking a minute step towards Sam. "Goodness, no! He's not dead, merely unconcious. We have approximately three minutes before he begins to revive."

Looking down at the fallen man, Sam swallowed the knot in his throat as he saw his chest rise and fall. Wheeljack had taken him out with about as much effort and fuss as unplugging an appliance from the wall-- the agent was lucky he was only unconcious instead of dead. It could easy have been the other way around.

"We?"

"Yes," Wheeljack shuffled another step towards him. It required every ounce of willpower Sam possesed not to lean away. "Of course, that is assuming that you would wish to accompany me to rescue you mate."

Sam's head snapped up fast enough to give him whiplash. "But don't you need to stay here and, I don't know, guard the base or something?"

(Stop arguing, idiot!)

Optics spinning and clicking, fingers moving restlessly, Wheeljack lowered himself so that they faced each other on the same level, his voice emerging direly earnest. "I should, but this time I will not. For too long I have hung back in the safety of my labs in fear." A pregnant pause. "Though I am ashamed to admit it, there is no use in hiding the fact that I am a coward. I fear pain. I fear death. But now, Sam," he whispered urgently, "I have the chance to make a difference in something meaningful. You would not be able to succeed in rescuing your mate all on your own, and all of the Autobots programed for battle have left to combat the Decepticon incurrsion. I may be of little help if we encounter enemy resistance, but I would not wish for you to risk your life totally unaided."

Screwing his eyes tightly shut so he wouldn't have to look at Dave's placid body or Wheeljack's hopeful expression, Sam rammed his fingers through his hair and turned away.

"Yeah, well, we both have a major problem-- all the planes are gone, and we're stuck on an island!"

"That is not...entirely true."

"Humans can't swim across the ocean, Wheeljack."

"I was not refering to swimming in any case."

Sam's eyes flashed open at the whirling, clicking, grating sound of rapidly transforming metal-- he looked up in time to see the last few pieces of the alien rubik's cube sliding into place on a sleek, powerful japanese motorcyle where moments before the engineer had stood. A white blur shot high into the air, arcing towards him. Sam started to jump out of the way, but realizing what it was he lifted his arms instead and snagged it before it could hit the ground. A helmet.

Wheeljack revved his engine. His voice, when he spoke, emerged from inside the helmet rather than from the motorcycle itself.

"There is an old tunnel left over from before we chose this base for our purposes that connects the island to the mainland. I believe it still exists, though it may have been walled over."

Glancing towards Dave to make sure the agent wouldn't suddenly leap up and grab on to his ankle, Sam slid the helmet on his head, hoping nothing freaky and alien would attack his brain when he did. To his relief, it felt and acted like a normal helmet.

"Will that be a problem?"

The motorcycle's engine revved again-- though muted by a muffler, the sound was still the most dangerous noise he had ever heard an engine make. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

"It shouldn't be," Wheeljack replied, voice whispering in Sam's ear.

"Good," he nodded to himself (--_it's all happening so fast, too fast-- not fast enough-- Mikaela!--)_. "Excellent. --Um, though I should probably warn you I have no idea how to ride a motorcycle," he added, cautiously approaching the sleek white beast.

"That will not be a problem. An internal gyroscope allows me to remain upright, and my self-guidance programs negate the necessity of a human driver." The handlebars twitched invitingly.

Sam jumped as Dave let out a low groan from behind him. Apparently, their three minutes were up.

"Hold on a sec!" He called to Wheeljack, latching onto an idea. He backtracked to the still mostly unconcious agent, kneeling beside him and pulling open his jacket, revealing the gun nestled in its shoulder strap.

"I'm _so _going to jail for this," he muttered to himself, extracting the gleaming weapon and checking the magazine. It was full. Then, realizing he had no place to put the gun, he hefted the agent's torso from the floor, pulled off his jacket, and wiggled the shoulder harness from his arm. Fumbling with the leather straps, he finally discovered how it clipped together and slipped it on over his own shirt, tucking the stolen gun away it its holster. That done, he shrugged into the agent's crumpled gray jacket and buttoned it closed to conceal the weapon. A little too long in the arms, but it would have to do.

"Alright," he called, scrambling back to the motocycle that pulled around to meet him. "I'm ready."

He swung his leg over the seat, reaching forward to grip the handlebars. For a moment he hesitated, not wanting to lift his feet from the floor, fearful that the bike would tip over. But then Wheeljack settled the issue for him by rolling forward, and with a yelp he tucked in his legs to keep his feet from being pulled off at the ankles. The motorcycle remained as steady as ever.

The engine turned over and let out another frightening roar, and the visor on the helmet slammed down over his eyes of its own accord. Scrawling, indecipherable diagrams lit up across the curved surface, providing reems of alien data for whatever object his eyes focused on. Way cool.

"Are you ready, Sam?"

At the soft, many-layed question, images crowded into his mind-- Mikaela laughing, smiling, leaning back against him, her dark hair soft on his neck. He forced back the grisly flashes of blood and gore (_dead dead dead_), burying them beneath a shower of memories, a cascade of all the little smiles and touches and glances that were full of happiness and peace rather than pain and misery. He focused on them with a furious, single-minded intensity, refusing to even consider any other outcome. He held the images of the future he wanted in his mind-- Mikaela happy, healthy and alive. That's what he wanted to happen, so that's what he was going to _make _happen. Even if he had to move heaven and earth to do it.

The stolen jacket hung strangely from his shoulders; the gun was a heavy, fearful weight at his side.

_'I'm coming, Mikaela.'_

"Let's do this."

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Bumblebee knew there was no such thing as a 'bad feeling'.

His five million micro processors firmly backed this conclusion, as did his logic relays and situational analysis programs. Humans used the term merely to refer to the outcome of complex subconcious algorithims that absorbed and processed sensory data below the recognition threshold. Trillions of terabytes of data-- less than .0001% of which went on to be transmitted into the higher cerebellum-- would flow in through a human's organic senses to be processed by those algorithims, at which time various signals of which they were unaware-- a pheromone scent related to agression, for instance-- would be translated into a subconcious impulse. Or, as they called it, a 'bad feeling'.

As a robotic organism, Bumblebee had no subconcious, and thus every byte of data flowing into his systems (greater by a magnitude of 253.889 than what a human could recieve, given the higher preception capabilities of his sensors) could be directly accessed by his 'concious mind'. There were no signs or signals that went unnoticed; therefore, logically, he should not experience a 'bad feeling'.

And yet as he pulled to a stop 1,342.761 yards from the entrance to an abandoned warehouse at the center of Lagos, he could not supress the various self-generating alerts that flashed through his central processing unit. They were infuriatingly non-specific, and sighted no sensory data. Technically, they should not have existed unless there was an errant string of code somewhere in his programs to create them. But there they were-- his 'bad feelings'. And by Primus, were there a lot of them.

Training a greater precentage of his external sensors that was strictly necessary on the warehouse, he watched for any sign that the alerts were warranted. His search for the stealth-type Cybertronian had been mostly fruitless until the night before when he had stumbled across a fresh trail. The mirage itself may have been adept at escaping whenever he approached, but even its talents were not sufficient to erase the infinitessimal heat signature left in its wake. Oh, its cooling dampeners were of the highest caliber, of that there was no doubt. Any other Autobot would not have been able to detect the .0006 degree difference that deliniated where another Cybertronian had passed, but Bumblebee was not any other Autobot. He was a scout. And, as the humans would say, a damn good one too.

So he had traced the stealth-type as far as the warehouse where, apparently, it had been retreating once every six hours. And that was probably why the ghost alerts had begun to flood his higher function processors, forcing him to estabilish a back-up relay simply to eliminate them. (Bumblebee would have preferred to hunt down the programming error that caused them in the first place, but doing so would be much more time consuming). His logical relays had been humming for hours searching for a reason that the mirage would need, or even want, to return repeatedly to the warehouse. As of yet it had shown superior processing ability when it came to avoiding detection and outpacing any pursuers, but leaving such an obvious trail seemed indicative of a being unafraid of being detected. Or, as his 'bad feeling' warned him, the action of a being that _wanted _to be found.

The mission should, in theory, have been a simple one. When on the battle field or when entering into unknown territory, Autobots and Decepticons alike continually relayed a passive data bloc that would alert all other Cybertronians as it their allegience when they approached within a certain range. There was no danger of accidentally broadcasting one's presence to one's enemies, as the data bloc could not be recieved beyond a range of a few meters, and even then only when the other Cybertronian focused a specific pair of receptors to intercept the bloc. If the mirage had been an Autobot in hiding, it would have recognized Bumblebee almost immediately and ceased its efforts to flee. If it had been a Decepticon, Bumblebee himself would have known.

The problem, however, was that the stealth-type did not broadcast a data bloc at all, even to declare itself neutral. Like its human name, the mirage existed almost as nothing more than an empty patch of air.

As much as Bumblebee loathed the idea of being forced into a physical confrontation, it seemed to be the only recourse available to him. An ally would have announced itself at once-- only an enemy would hide.

Engaging his internal sound dampeners and initializing his own stealth programs, Bumblebee carefully transformed back into his bipedal mode. An earlier sensor sweep had revealed that no humans or recording deceives had a direct line of sight to the area where he had positioned himself, so he was in no danger of being spotted by any Terran threat. There was, however, the very real possibility of being detected by a Cybertronian one.

Creeping forward, clinging to the shadows cast by the quarter moon, he redirected as much power as he dared to his forward sensors, amplifying them until he could monitor the exact geometric patterns the dust inside the warehouse made as it drifted through the air, could count the hairs on the legs of the spiders in the rafters, could follow the faint heat signature of the mirage through every thousanth of a millimeter shift. He could detect nothing else within the warehouse that might have posed a threat.

His logic relays spun; his scenario programs cycled through hundreds of thousands of possible options. Still he could not come up with a satisfactory reason for the stealth-type to linger within the crumbling human structure.

56 more 'bad feeling' alerts popped up on his HUD. With a jab of servos so vicious it was almost a snarl, he erased them from his primary memory banks.

Wait. 'Snarl'?

While his primary systems focused on the task at hand, a secondary processing core began to mull over his own internal use of the human description. There were no humans present-- there was no reason for his mimicry circuits to be functioning. A sectioned systems check revealed that they weren't, to his bafflement. Why employ the word inside his own core unit where it would not be heard by any humans even if they _were _present? For that matter, why did it come up at all while his mimicry circuits were not engaged?

He sent a background cognitive program off to put together a logical explanation. But instead of having it return with a possible reason, he recieved a notification that a system-wide program had been initiated. A questioning ping bounced off a firewall, rocking him to the core.

**SECONDARY PROGRAMING INADEQUATE. AUDITING AND IMPLIMENTING NECESSARY CHANGES.**

Immediately he began to comb his systems for the presence of a virus, finding none. What that implied was almost as disturbing as the presence of the firewall itself-- the sleeper program was of his own design.

Why was he changing his own programming, adding in seemingly useless lines of code that induced constant 'bad feeling' alerts and changed the very nature of his internal musings to incorporate human words?

For once, his logic relays could present him with only one explanation. So he shut them down. No. There had to be another reason. Rachet had only indicated that it might be a _possibility_. He tried to shut down the sleeper program too and was firmly rebuffed.

Well then.

Not willing to dwell any longer on possibilities that sent his emotion cores fluctuating wildly, he shut down the examination programs running through his secondary systems, concentrating all his processing power on the task occupying his primary systems: Subduing the stealth-type.

When the entrance to the warehouse came within visual sensor range, he flicked a command at the transformation unit in his right arm, retracting and changing and four digit appendage the humans called a hand into a pulse-blast ion cannon. Gathering a charge in the weapon, he aimed it towards the open door of the warehouse, clinging to the walls to present less of a target. His infrared tracing sensors informed him that the mirage had not moved.

16 more alerts pinged from his data hub, each one as unspecific as the other 453 that had so far been created, and he swiftly erased them as he had with all the others. Quasi-human 'bad feelings' were infuriatingly lacking in substantial information.

6.223 yards from the entrance to the warehouse, Bumblebee paused, a blip of erroneous data passing through his sensors. For .000219 seconds, the heat signature disappeared.

An astounding total of 7,566,337 alerts crowded into his primary systems. This time, despite the fact that his logic relays concluded that there was only a .000001% chance that the blip had been anything but a brief sensor malfunction (not completely out of the question, given that his internal repair systems were still fixing the last of the damage from the battle in Egypt), he decided to listen to those little alerts.

A program humans would have referred to as 'intution' engaged, informing him that if the miarge _was _aware of his presence and intended to attack him, the most logcial place to appear would be the opposite of where he sensors were currently fixated. Or, in other words, directly in front of him.

He brought his cannon to bear at the open space before the warehouse, but he was not swift enough to unleash its captured charge. The air before him rippled with invextion currents, and suddenly the stealth-type blinked into existence, lunging for him while still in the process of materializing.

Bumblebee dove to the side, targeting programs engaging and locking on the the mirage's heat signature. His cannon swung around, leading the Cybertronian as it sailed past him, and let off a controlled pulse blast. Even if the stealth-type possesed some sort of technology that enabled it to render itself invisible to most scans, its heat signature would still remain.

Yet just as the energy packet from his cannon should have impacted the stealth-type in a critical knee joint, his infrared scanners rippled once again-- _and the mirage vanished from existence_. The blue bolt of energy sailed harmlessly past and splashed into the dirt.

For a moment his logical relays seized. Specialized amophoric skin capable of reflecting all light in such a way as to cloak the subject from the visual spectrum was definitely within the realm of possibility, even if not yet realized in any Cybertronian he had encountered. But for even the faintest heat signature to vanish would require something even more astounding, something impossible to accept. The subject itself would need to exit the very dimension in which the observer remained.

As much as he loathed the necessity, Bumblebee was forced to come to grips with the fact that another of his kind could not only turn invisible, but travel through and even remain within a construct not unlike a space bridge. Space bridges had fallen out of use thousands of years ago due to the inherent danger associated with their use and the utter lack of stealth that accompanied the opening of a space bridge. Not only that, but a space bridge itself was merely a _bridge_, a means of transportation.

His sensors extending out in every direction on the spherical plane, Bumblebee eyed his chronometer. .02 seconds. .78 seconds. 1.4 seconds. 3.65 seconds.

And the mirage reappeared.

Unless the stealth-type possesed a much more discreet model of the space bridge and had teleported away from the area for 3.65 seconds before returning (highly unlikely), the only option left to consider was the unthinkable. Somehow, the mirage was able to remain suspended in subspace.

He fired off another shot before his adversary teleported away again. Though the confrontation would likely progress much more quickly if he physically engaged the other, Bumblebee dared no do so. The probability that he would be teleported away and left for all eternity in a pocket of subspace was far too high.

Running the stealth-type's pattern of teleportations through a battle simulator, Bumblebee was able to predict the most likely place that the other would reappear. He aimed his cannon back towards the warehouse.

But it seemed that the mirage had grown tired of playing games. Rather than appear at a distance of no less than five yards and no greater than twelve has it had before, the Stealth-type shimmered into existence less than .33 yards from his chest, far too close to be warded off with a shot from his cannon.

Invection currents rippled around its left forelimb, rendering it invisible on the visual spectrum (though its heat signature remained), and without warning the stealth-type plunged its intangible appendage into his chest. His tactile sensors registered nothing, but the critical circuit governing movement abruptly ceased to function.

Every gear, servo and muscle cable suddenly left his control, leaving him completely immobile. The charge in his cannon died, though the arm itelf remained extended, little warnings flashing across his HUD to inform him that undue strain was being place on the shoulder joint without his muscle cables to counteract the weight of his own limb. Not an immeditate problem, but it caused a sensation that in humans would not be unlike pain.

Leaving its appendage buried in his chest, the stealth-type initiated a level three scan, one of the deepest and most powerful scans that did not actually penetrate the central processing unit. If he could have, Bumblebee would have twitched as every metalloid cell in his body pulled and twisted under the force of the scan.

When the scan had run its course, the mirage began to speak.

Another surprise, one that his logic relays protested against strenuously. Not only did the stealth-type forgo using a brief burst of data to convey whatever message/threat it wished to pass on to the scout, it also spoke in english rather than Cybertronian.

"He calls you Bee."

There was no doubt in any of his primary, secondary, or tertiary systems which 'he' the mirage referred to. The unspoken familiarity with his human charge caused every one of Bumblebee's defense/protection protocols to come online.

"In your attempt to save him, you have caused more damage than you know."

His logical relays began to whirl, processing that, and he furiously shut them back down. The mirage was employing a well known (but still very effective) psychological warfare technique. He would not allow himself to be thrown off balance.

::What do you want?:: He transmitted back.

"The nameless one is coming."

Scanning his memory banks, Bumblebee came up blank for any connection between the Fallen and 'the nameless one'. But that did not rule out the possibility that the mirage had simply constructed a new designation for the ancien Cybertronian.

::We have already broken the power of the Fallen, Decepticon::

"True, I am a Decepticon. But I speak not of the Fallen."

::Who, then?::

"The dark god."

This time, Bumblebee did not need to scour his memory banks to recognize the name. But though he was very familiar with the legend of Unicron, that still did not explain the mirage's purpose for rendering him unable to escape only to try to intimidate him into submission. If the Decepticon wanted to eliminate him, it didn't need to try to unbalance his mental processes to do it.

::What do you want?:: He asked again.

"They will not believe you when you speak of me."

The mirage planned to let him go?

::What do you want?::

"But _you _must believe me, because I am the only one who can help you."

He could not speak, only transmit tiny pre-set data packets. If he had retained the ability to speak, he possibly could have tricked further information from the mirage. As it was, he could only ask the same question.

::What do you want?::

"Do you believe we all have a destiny? A purpose we are designed and created to fulfill?"

::What do you want?::

"Oh well. To each his own, I suppose."

::What do you want?::

"He is the key to it; he is the key to everything. But without you, it all comes unglued."

::What do you want?::

"He needs you and you need me, but I need you both in turn. A nice little circle, isn't it?"

::What do you want?::

"The dark god is coming."

Bumblebee suspected that the Decepticon had a severe malfuction somewhere in its processors. Its speech was erratic, skipping from topic to topic seemingly at random. But yet, how could something as simple as a malfunction cause it to know things about him that no one could possibily know?

"I will contact you again in the future. And since I need you to believe me, I'm going to tell you a secret. A good-will gift, as it were."

Bumblebee changed the message he sent out to a single glyph, the equivalent of a questioning grunt.

::?::

"Starscream is plotting behind Megatron's back. And Soundwave intends to betray us all. Though I cannot inform you of their plans, there is one thing I can tell you."

::?::

"Are you listening? It's very important."

Power flowed back into his central mobility circuit as the mirage withdrew its hand. Overblanced, Bumblebee stumbled backwards.

"Hurry, little scout," the stealth-type whispered, "Your bonded is in danger."

And with another ripple of air currents, the mirage vanished once more.

Bumblebee had wondered before precisely what the sleeper program was meant to do. But at the prophetic words that all the logical simulations in the universe could not make him doubt were true, it powered up and surged into his processing systems.

**INITIALIZING PRIMARY DEFENSE PROTOCOLS**.

Fear-- even terror-- was a very real phenomenon for any living creature, human or otherwise. Although Cybertronians were more apt to control it, analyze it, and package it away behind firewalls and logic program loops, they were as susceptible to it as the basest of terran life forms. At that moment, all the situational logs, logic relays and stabilizing programs in the galaxy could not stop unbridled terror from welling up in his emotional cores and streaming into the rest of his systems. Hundreds of wailing alarms alerted him to cascading processor overloads and logical failures that exceeded the set parameters meant to keep him from becoming a wild, uncontrollable machine that would stop at nothing to achieve the end lodged in its central processing unit. The sleeper program seemed willing-- almost eager-- to help him dismantle the programed and self-installed restraints around his reactionary systems.

**RESTRUCTURING ACTION/INACTION PARAMETERS**

The last firewall fell away, and suddenly the need to find/detain/destroy the mirage shrunk to a niggling speck in the very back of his processors. Unimportant.

Sensors powering up past the safely sustainable level, secondary systems logging on to the NEST computers and sending out a flurry of data requests to every database, satellite, website and camera he could reach, Bumblebee initiated his transformation sequence, tires spinning at 60, 80, 100 miles per hour before they even touched the ground.

Transformation complete, he rocketed off into the night, racing away from the warehouse, reconfiguring his internal structures as he went, pumping even greater speed into his engine-- 120, 130, 150, 170-- restructuring his shocks and tires and even the frame under his camaro shell to be able to go as fast as concievably possible, and faster still.

Nothing else mattered, nothing save for the single fact filling every program, every relay, every data log, every sensor sweep, every processing core, warbling through every system and flashing through thousands, millions, of wailing red alerts, each edged with a countdown scrolling steadily backwards towards zero. An estimation. A deadline.

And still the littany continued.

Sam is in danger.

Sam is in danger.

_Sam is in danger!_

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Author's note: HAZAH! It is DONE! (_Finally_)

Before I get stoned to death for being so late with this chapter, allow me the chance present the three very good reasons for taking so long.

1) This chapter is a raging monster. Longer chapter = long writing time. 2) I had to do LOTS of research for the various elements mentioned herein. 3) I suffered from a severe case of writer's block for four days, but as you can see, I finally managed to bludgeon it into submission. Yay!

I also have a few technical notes to mention before anyone comes whinning that I did something wrong. First, I'm assuming that after the big mess with the Fallen the Autobots decided to relax their laws about not sharing weapons tech with humans (part of the treaty they signed).

Second, the Army regulation I had Lennox paraphrase is a REAL army regulation. That's right, folks, I did my homework. The Geneva Convention II Accords is my invention, however.

Just to let you guys know, I'm leaving to go on vacation Saturday and will not return until wednesday. Hopefully I'll have the opprotunity to work on something while I'm away, but I'm not going to bust my butt like I've been doing.

And for those of you who didn't know, I now have a series of one-shots related to this story up. If you guys are kind with your reviews, I may just whip up another chapter of that tomorrow.


	13. The Gathering Storm: Part 1

_'She's going to be okay. She's going to be okay.'_

Powerful headlamps flashing from stone walls, parting the curtain of blackness.

'_Nothing to worry about. We'll find her, kick some Decepticon butt, and everything will be okay.'_

The roar of an alien engine beneath him, rumbling through his chest, his arms, like some great beast shaking the bars of its cage. Plunging forward down the unlit tunnel, speedometer cresting 90mph. Walls flying past, appearing from the darkness before them and vanishing again into the pall over his shoulder.

_'Everything's going to be okay.'_

Hands griping the handlebars until the tendons stood out on his forearms. Teeth clenched, eyes held wide open (--_don't forget to breathe_--).

_'It'll be okay.'_

Sam only wished the mental reassurance sounded more forceful and less like the trembling plea of a tiny child. But at the moment, he felt about as helpless as a little kid-- once more the world had begun to crumble beneath him, careening out of control, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He wasn't Superman or God or Optimus Prime-- he couldn't leap over a building, bend a few steel bars, stop a bullet or two with his chest, and set things back the way they were. He couldn't reverse time and stop Mikaela's phone from being crunched like a tin can, couldn't prevent whatever had happened from happening again; he couldn't snap his fingers and teleport them to her side (where was Jetfire when you needed him?). He was only Sam. Just human, vulnerable, easily-squishable, terrified Sam armed only with a gun and a spindly metal engineer that would probably be as much use in a fight as a newborn chiwawa against a pit bull. So he was stuck doing things the superpower-less way.

The logical part of his mind assured the rest of him that it had taken less than thirty seconds for Wheeljack to tear from the room at something approaching mach 3, skid around a few corners, and dive down into the abandoned sea floor tunnel. That same part was also confident that they had only been traveling down said tunnel for about eleven seconds (--_one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand_--). But every atom of his being, from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair, screamed that even one second more-- even a fraction of a second more-- was far too long. After all, it would only take an instant for a robotic foot to crush her skull, or for a powerful blow to snap her in half, or a blast from a cannon to dissolve her broken body into red mist and scraps of clothing.

_"Your heart rate is approaching 112 beats per minute, Sam. You need to relax."_ Wheeljack's voice whispered from the helmet. A small diagram appeared in the corner of the visor to accompany the words, showing an eerily detailed rendering of his own heart palpitating far faster than he would have thought possible. Funny, it didn't feel like it was racing that fast.

_'She's going to be okay. She has to be. She WILL be.'_

"We humans really aren't so good at making ourselves relax," he ground out.

Walls blurring past, glowing witch-fire green through the night vision setting of the visor.

(--_four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand_--)

How long is this stupid tunnel?!

The floating heart continued to pound for a moment in the lower left-hand corner of his vision, then abruptly vanished with a small click of disapproval. Luckily Wheeljack didn't try to convince him otherwise with Rachet-speak mumbo-jumbo, or else soothe him with meaningless platitudes.

"_The exit is approximately 532 yards and closing from our current position, although it has been bricked over to discourage human entrance from the other side."_

Sam held a groan in check, teeth clicking together in agitation. An exit that was no longer an exit meant that they would have to stop and break down the cemented wall before they could get out of the tunnel. How long would it take for him to dismount? How long would it take Wheeljack to pull down the mortared bricks-- two minutes? Five? (--_no time!--)_

"Great. I should have brought a shovel."

Rather than reply, Wheeljack snatched control of the HUD display on the visor, zooming in on the brilliant green wall rapidly approaching them at the end of the tunnel. Dozens of alien programs opened and began to scroll through reems of data, analyzing the obstruction.

_"If my readings are correct, you should have no need of a shovel. A single ultra-sonic emission for a duration of .53 seconds should suffice."_

"'Ultra-sonic emission'? What-- _oh shit!"_

The engine between his legs gave a dark, dangerous snarl, and the white motorcycle leapt forward as though it had not already been traveling close to 100mph. The wall hurtled towards them, rapidly expanding to fill his field of vision.

"Wheeljack! Are you trying to kill us?!"

_"Quite the opposite." _

The sides of the helmet abruptly seemed to shrink inwards, foamy material pressing against then stopping his ears. A shiver danced up his spine from his lower back to the crown of his head at the contact and the sudden absence of sound. He hadn't realized how mind-numbingly loud Wheeljack's engine was until he could no longer hear it-- not even a whisper. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, but he couldn't hear the air whistling past his lips. When he tried to call the alien's name, he couldn't be sure that his vocal cords were even working, despite the fact that he felt his lips move.

Then suddenly, radiating outwards from the body of the motorcycle, came a thrumming pulsation. More vibration than sound, it resonated through his bones, standing his hair on end. If his ears hadn't been sealed tighter than a new pickle jar, the force of it alone probably would have punctured his ears drums. It started a low, grumbling bass, then swiftly ascended up the scale to a fluttering twitter rapid enough to pace a hummingbird's wings. A faint trickle of sound reminiscent of a dog whistle leaked past his alien-made ear plugs. Ouch.

The high-pitch squeal only lasted half a second; the green rectangle that marked the outer wall-- hurtling towards them like a truck, so close that if Wheeljack had boasted another coat of paint they would have collided-- shattered like glass. A hail of brick chunks the size of golf balls broke around them as they barreled through the crumbling wall, bouncing harmlessly from Wheeljack's armor and less harmlessly (OW!) from his own back. Once glanced off the helmet with a loud _ping!, _though the blow itself felt as light as someone flicking their finger against the white paint.

The green haze filling the visor immediately cleared as they emerged into the startlingly bright morning. Wheeljack must have retracted the foamy ear plugs while he was distracted with contemplating the hurtling wall pieces (_he destroyed a three-foot-thick wall using only sound?)_ because the tire-squealing, horn-honking, zooming-car sounds of a busy highway suddenly broke over him like rip tide, dragging him into the chaotic world that existed beyond the tunnel.

Sam gave an inarticulate cry of alarm. He threw up a hand as if to ward off the sudden crush of sound and motion-- black asphalt, gray concrete, rushing blurs of cars and trucks-- buffeted from all sides by the pounding slip-stream given off by the speeding rush hour vehicles.

Just his luck-- saved from becoming a greasey smear on a brick wall only to face an unavoidable destiny as a mangled hood ornament.

It figured that the post-it wielding alien would come bursting from a hidden tunnel at 120mph straight into oncoming traffic.

A red toyota came bearing down on them, its driver distracted by her cellphone. But Wheeljack-- possesed of reflexes to put fly-snatching ninjas to shame-- simply reared up with a squeal of protesting tires and leapt up onto the rusted hood, drove across the roof, and went sailing through the air off the back of the car. While still suspended above the pavement, facing down the grill of a Mac truck tailgating the red toyota, the handlebars twisted in Sam's grip, jerking the bike around in a one-eighty. The back wheel contacted the ground with a jaw-rattling bump-- the front end of the bike swung to face in the same direction as the other cars, engine roaring. But the truck was too close for them to accelerate out of its path.

Before Sam even had the chance to let out an eep of fear (--_don't wanna die, don't wanna die!--)_, the white motorcycle touched down on both wheels, fishtailed, and tipped so far to one side that Sam's jeans scraped the ground. And they went _under _the Mac truck, dropping back between its wheels, the air thundering around him with a force of a jet engine, the light dimming in the rumbling shadow. While still tilted at an angle that should have reduced them both to road kill, the bike turned, and they slid out from under the mammoth steel monster. Wheeljack righted himself between the lanes, wheels riding the broken yellow lines separating the streams of cars, and accelerated again. The needle rocketed up the dial, sending them flying past the truck and the red toyota (whose driver had dropped her cell phone and stared after them in amazement).

Sam let out his breath, feeling faint (--_somebody stop the world, I want off_--).

"Okay," he warbled, "I think I've had enough excitement for today."

Only after the fact did he realize that he was trying to squeeze the handlebars into playdough. He ordered his hands to loosen-- they remained locked firmly in place.

_"Are you referring to the common recreational pastime of seeking near-death or death-like thrills in order to induce a release of adrenaline?"_

Of course the eccentric robot had to sound chipper-- even curious-- about the whole thing, as though they hadn't both avoided a fatal collison by millimeters. Sam shook himself (don't cringe-- those cars are a foot away from hitting you.....okay, cringe), brushing off the question and replying with one of his own.

"What was that? That sound thing-- how did you smash the wall?"

"That _was an ultra-sonic emission tailored to the frequency of the mortar between the bricks which, when used at a sufficient decibal level, caused the wall to vibrate apart."_

Sam had seen the Autobots do a lot of cool tricks before, but he had never known they had ultra-sonic whatevers up their sleeves.

....wait.

"Is the ultra-sonic doohickey that self-defense weapon of yours?"

_"Yes. It is very useful for disabling attackers. If you had heard it without any sort of aural protection, it would have completely destroyed your audio recievers."_

"Oh. That sounds...pretty awesome," he replied weakly.

The howling currents of air tore at his jacket, threatening to wrench him from the bike if not for the death grip he kept on the seat with his knees. His own reflection flashed back at him from car windows as they passed, strange and mysterious-- too strong, too confident, his face no more than a dark shadow beneath the angular planes of the gleaming white helmet. He didn't _look _scared out of his mind with dread; the effects of the adrenaline flowing through his veins like a thick, black ichor-- pounding through his skull, spasming in his muscles-- vanished when viewed through the reflected image.

(--_all a lie, all a lie, don't let them see it's only Clark Kent, only powerless Sam with his stolen gun and jacket_--)

_"I'm delighted that you think so," _Wheeljack preened, apparently missing the sarcasm (and the bad pun) in his voice. _"The technology itself is rather complex, altougth the concept behind it is really quite simple. First--"_

"Stay on topic. We need to find Mikaela, remember?"

Something in Wheeljack's voice changed then-- a concealing sparkle, an affected lightness, dropped away, leaving the utter seriousness Sam had heard when the alien confronted him over Dave's unconcious body.

_"Yes, Sam. I do remember. Ever since we exited the tunnel I have been scanning the various radio frequencies of the local police, fire, and emergency services departments for any reports of Decepticon attacks or any reference to a young female of Mikaela's description." _Dozens of chattering voices abruptly filled the space around his head-- dozens of separate conversations whose paricipants continued on unaware of the alien eavesdropper. There were a few english words peppered throughout the jumble, but trying to follow what was being said was impossible-- not only were there far too many chattering voices to catch on to any one conversation, but most of what he heard was spoken in a language far too exotic to be encountered in the foreign language department of any high school. _"So far I have not been able to find anything that might be of use. We are currently en route to the airport from which Mikaela was scheduled to leave, as that would be the best place to begin our search." _

The chaotic tangle of foreign words switched off, leaving only Wheeljack's voice whispering in his ear. Sam's stomach tightened at the implications of his words, both good and bad-- good, in that it would have been the talk of the town (well, okay, the airwaves) if a Decepticons had cropped up nearby. Bad, in that he still had no idea where Mikaela was. A timer in the back of his mind continued to tick, counting off the seconds (--_one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand_--).

Every second held an eternity of bleak possibilites.

Every second fled past like a rushing stream, red numbers reeling, blurring, counting down far faster than a motorcycle could drive, even an alien one.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick--

Wheeljack spoke again after a meaningful pause, tone changing, growing almost timid. _"As there is nothing we can do at the moment but wait, I had hoped a discussion with a neutral-- although enthralling-- subject would help to reduce your adrenaline levels since, as you said, 'humans aren't so good at making themselves relax'."_

Coming from Bee, the comment and the attempt behind it would have been edged with humor and concern. From Optimus, both would have been matter-of-fact and gravely (apologetically) delivered. Rachet would have come across as blindly arrogant, making him feel inferior without really trying too. Mudflap and Skids...well, they probably couldn't have said something like that in the first place without breaking down in simulated laughter, so it was a moot point. But with Wheeljack, Sam once more got the sense that the robot was moving out of his comfort zone, extending an olive branch and a wavering hand, terrified that he would be bitten for his efforts. And suddenly, he realized what he had been picking up from the engineer all along-- though Wheeljack had the habit of diving into problems (and personal-space bubbles) without reservation when engrossed in a project, on the whole the alien was _shy_.

Huh. Sam never would have thought an immortal, incomprehensively intelligent being could be shy. And he wondered what unhealed scar, what dark secret, _('--tortured for three weeks--', '--murdered by my best friend--', '--wanted to complete the bond...but by then, it was too late--')_, had made him that way.

Maybe he didn't really want to know.

"Thanks. I, uh, appreciate it," he replied.

A drop of something wet and cool landed on the back of his hand. Water. He tilted his head back and looked up at the sky, for the first time realizing that the light was far darker than it should have been at ten in the morning-- dark, roiling clouds loomed overhead, hanging so low in the sky that the blanket they made seemed likely to snag on the tops of the skyscrappers in could see in the distance. Perfect. Monsoon season.

As another rain drop splatted against the visor on his helmet, his mind kicked into overdrive. A sudden squall would really put a crimp in his finding-Mikaela plans-- he didn't know if Wheeljack came equipped with all-weather tires, but if the roads were flooded no amount of alien ingenuity could keep them driving, much less at their current pace (he felt certain they were trailing at least three cop cars as it was). And sheeting torrents of rain would make it harder to locate a broken, Mikaela-sized lump.

Another glance at the clouds (he didn't dare risk taking his eyes off the cars rushing past them for more than a second or two at a time) confirmed that they seemed ready to burst at any time, likely at the most inconvenient moment possible just to spite him. The universe was like that-- and it had a grudge against him.

Okay, so, problem one: Don't know where Mikaela is.

Problem two: It's going to starting pouring sooner or later. All money on sooner rather than later.

Problem three: As far as Wheeljack's top-of-the-line eavedropping equipment can tell, she's simply vanished from existance, and there doesn't seem to be any Decepticon wreckage we can follow back to the scene of the crime.

It was problem three that was the real stickler. Mikaela had been in a taxi on the highway when she was k-- (DON'T SAY IT) injured by a Decepticreep. Since logically any one Decepticon-- or even an entire army of the things-- couldn't wipe out all the witnesses (and simply turning the area into a sheet of glass would attract even _more _attention), there should have been _someone_, somewhere, who had seen what happened and was blabbing about it all over the place.

Unless....

Unless there _were _no Decepticons involved. Unless something as simple, as mundane, as frighteningly ordinary as a car crash had caused her to scream like that. In which case it was entirely plausible that the story had caused less of a ripple in the news media than a grain of sand dropping into a pond. Nothing interesting here, folks, just another car crash, just someone else who's died-- but who cares about that, millions of people die everyday-- just another death, another statistic, box it up and pack it away on a dusty shelf full of boxes in a dusty warehouse full of shelves in a dusty lot full of warehouses, no more important than a dead fly or a falling leaf-- happens every day, every hour, every minute, every second-- not important, not important, doesn't matter that one world ended and cast another into darkness--

Sam ruthlessly shut down the spiralling train of thought. It couldn't be that easy to end it all. No, it had to be something more dramatic, more _meaningful _than a car crash. Someone so brave, so loving, so kind could not have been cut down like any other worthless blade of grass in an endless lawn--

He slammed the brakes on that thought as well, taping it up in a cardboard box and tossing it over the cliff in his mind where all the other things he feared to look at or examine had found their final resting place. It didn't matter whether it had been a Decepticon attack or a car crash that had wrenched such a nightmarish scream from his wife (--_wife! woah_--). It didn't matter in the least, because she wasn't dead.

"Wheeljack. Scan ambulance radios, hospital calls, heck, even those police transmitter things truckers use. Look for any news of a car crash involving a taxi," he ordered, hunkering down on the bike and tightening the muscles across his shoulders as if in preparation to do battle. Which he was, in a sense-- a battle against time. Lounging in a lawn chair at the forefront of his mind, Panic counted the minutes, the seconds, in blood red numbers.

One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand.

They were going to make it. There was no other option.

Thunder rumbled lazily through the clouds overhead.

Able to follow his human chain of reasoning for himself, Wheeljack didn't bother with asking why, but merely gave a warble of affirmation and began to furtively, silently, hunt through the tangled threads (--_lifelines_--) of inaudible sound being transmitted through the air.

Sam focused his gaze on the sky. Where they were at ground level the air was still, but hundreds of feet above them the wind drove the billowing gray mass across the sky at a gallop, dragging still more thunderheads into view over the horizon, rolling out an endless carpet of swollen clouds. Though he was loathe to interrupt the alien's search, the appearance of the menacing, strangely malignant storm seeded worry in his heart. Would the torrents of rain it promised drown them where they stood?

(--alone, all alone, crumpled body in a ditch, a pool of water-- water veined with red, darkening to scarlet-- pounding rain frothing from the surface, inching up over her broken form, closing over her head while unconcious breath continued to bubble from between slack lips--)

"It looks like it's going to pour," he mumbled, as if keeping his voice low would be less of a disturbance, "Please tell me you're water-proof. It would be really bad if you suddenly rusted solid."

Wheeljack answered at once, which indicated that his radio scan didn't use up the entirety of his processing power (thank God...and Mojo). _"Not to worry, Sam. As our bodies are composed of a dense alloy rather than iron, we do not rust." _Oh. Somehow, he felt he should have seen that coming. Megatron hadn't looked rusty when he came back from the dead, after all. _"And as for being water-proof....barring massive internal damage and disablement of the self-repair systems, our electical circuits always remain closed. Every wire itself it sheathed in a flexible, tear-resistant, non-conductive material,"_ he explained, voice regaining some of its hyper enthusiasm at having a willing listener, _"and if for some reason a wire _does _become disconnected, the surface layer of metalloid cells along the raw edges of the break transmute their internal structure to become insulating rather than conductive, instantly sealing off the wire and preventing an unwanted discharge of electricity. The self-repair systems never even need to become involved in small-scale damage-- at least, not right away-- as the trasmutation reaction is automatically initiated without any command signal or energy input. The entire process could actually be compared to the formation of a scab. Your white blood cells do not need to seal the cut-- the blood itself hardens when exposed to the air (with the help of coagulants, although that is beside the point), thus forming a protective layer over the cut. The process within our own bodies is greatly accelerated, of course."_

Good old bumbling Wheeljack was trying to distract him again. Not wanting to upset the timid alien by calling him out, Sam merely drawled, "So....to sum all that up, we don't need to worry about being caught in a downpour."

Wheeljack gave the equilvalent of an electronic sigh when he refused to take the bait, mood darkening once more. _"Although I myself am in no danger from heavy amounts of precipitation, our search would be severely hampered if I attempted to drive through four feet of standing water."_

"Yeah," he grimaced, "I see your point. We wouldn't be able to make good time trying to slog through a river."

_"I fear that will be the least of our worries." _Wheeljack's voice turned grim as digital windows opened across the visor, reeling through countless charts and aliens symbols far faster than his eyes could track. _"The weather pattern we are observing is highly unusual-- the monsoon season should not have started for a few weeks yet, and this storm is far larger than normal."_

The ominious implication behind the words tickled the back of his neck with a chill wind.

"How much larger than normal are we talking about here?"

A new image appeared before his eyes, the semi-transparent lines overlapping the sight of the heavy traffic around them. For a moment or two he stared at it in incomprehension, not quite understanding what exactly he was looking at. But as his mind picked out the familiar shore line of India and Saudi Arabia-- memorized during many grueling hours in geography class-- he realized that the amorphous blob stretching across the visor was not a glitch in the data, not an unfamiliar ocean on a strange map.

Sam swallowed heavily, his mouth going dry, as he realized Wheeljack was showing him a sketched image of a giant storm sweeping inland from the Indian ocean-- a storm several thousand miles wide that stetched all the way across the Indian coastline and continued west to brush the middle eastern states. And the swirling mass wasn't just wide, but long as well-- even as it swelled up over the coast, its bulk remained adrift over the Indian Ocean, reaching halfway to Austrailia.

"That's....pretty big. Like, _apocalyptic _big. Jesus."

_"If the storm breaks before we can find Mikaela and transport her back to base, rate of travel will be the least of our worries. I could survive quite easily beneath twenty feet of water, but you would surely drown."_

"Then I guess we're just going to have to be faster than the storm."

_"Ideally the monsoon would hold off for about three days, as is quite common during the rainy season. However--"_

The alien voice suddenly cut off, replaced by a furtive silence.

"Wheeljack?" Sam questioned hesitantly.

As if in answer to his query, the handlebars suddenly jerked beneath his hands, turning sharply to the right. Sam struggled to remain seated as the bike skidded sideways down the highway between the screaming cars, throwing up a shower of sparks, tires locked and squealing in protest.

"$%#&!!!"

At the last possible instant, sliding rubber found traction again-- the bike leapt forward, plunging between the oncoming lines of cars, once more traveling in the wrong direction down the crowded highway. But before Sam had the chance to hang Wheeljack out to dry for giving him yet another massive dose of adrenaline and pushing him another step closer to heart failure, the motorcycle dodged sideways between the traffic, weaving its way in and out of the cars, and vaulted over the concrete median. Several cars on the other side of the highway lurched out the way to make room for the roaring white machine, though at least _these _were traveling in the right direction.

Sam reclaimed his swallowed tongue and croaked, "What--"

_"I've found her, Sam," _Wheeljack cut him off, twisting the throttle as far as it would go. Sam didn't dare look at the numbers flashing across the speedometer. _"You were right, it _was _a car accident. About six miles from here, a truck jack-knifed and collided with the taxi she was riding in."_

His heart stuttered, missing a beat.

"...is...she...?"

_"She's alive, Sam. Gravely injured, but alive. An ambulance is carrying her to a nearby hospital at this very moment."_

Sam stopped listening at the word 'alive'. He rolled it over his tongue, spelled it out in his mind--backwards and forwards-- breathed it in, lapped it up, and hugged it to himself so hard his eyes started to water. As much as he had tried to force away all thoughts of her death, at some level he must have expected her to be dead. Otherwise, the fact that she was wonderfully, gloriously _alive _wouldn't have come as somewhat of a surprise.

He focused only on the reassurance that somewhere her heart still beat (--_so_ _close, close enough to hear, to feel_--), refusing to dwell on the fact that her injuries might, at any moment, force it to still. The darker possibility-- repressed, yet still lingering overhead like the sword of Damocles-- gave the single word 'alive' an even greater light. He had never known a word could hold such power, could be so utterly beatiful. It rested like a butterfly in his cupped hands-- the goodness and grace of an entire world contained in its tiny body, infinitely wonderful, infinitely fragile. Stunning, awing, uplifting (that fraying thread of life never seemed so strong).

"Alive," he whispered. A word. A question. A prayer.

_"Yes."_

Bones both ratting and still-- breathing and yet not daring to breathe-- he redoubled his grip on the handlebars, hunkering low over the lean body of the motorcycle.

"Let's go make sure she stays that way."

And for once, he welcomed the unimaginable speed of the alien beneath him, grinning at the speedometer as it screeched towards 150. Reason said the Decepticons may not have been involved at all-- but Sam believed that about as much as he believed those free laptops advertised in pop-up adds were actually free. For whatever wonky alien reason they were lying low at the moment, waiting-- he was sure-- for the chance to finish what they had started.

The feel of the stolen gun pressing up against his side no longer felt awkward, accusitory, fearful. Instead it was a welcome friend, one he would use to stop any alien that tried to harm Mikaela.

He felt out for her heartbeat across the open, empty space, letting its imagined sound fill his mind.

_'Don't you even __**think **__about giving up. We haven't even exchanged rings yet.'_

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Location: Baghdad, Iraq

"Life," Barricade murmured to himself in a sing-song voice, "Is but a walking shadow. Poor player. Who knew his tale would be told by an idiot?"

The sniper drew back into the shadows of a mud-bricked building, grabbing at his battle protocols and bringing them online. External sensors zeroed in on the market square three streets away, flooding his primary processors with terabytes of data on every stone and speck of dirt contained withing the lopsided area between the human dwellings. The Autobots had not yet arrived, but he knew they would come. They always came. It made everything much more exciting.

**ERROR, EMOTIONAL CORE OVERFLOW. CONCULSIONS ILLOGICAL. CONCLUSIONS--**

((Instability alerts disengaged. Rerouting.....complete. Safety codes successfully fragmented. Blocking attempts at restoration....))

Barricade focused his optics on the tiny slice of the market square visible at the end of an alley. The sniper needed the unobstructed view in order to complete his mission, but he was also eager to be able to watch the drama unfold through his visual receptors rather than through infrared scans alone. Oh yes, it would be very exciting. Pleasurable, even. Humans possesed an astounding number of facial muscles capable of the most delicious expression of terror. Or agony. Preferably both at the same time. It would be interesting to watch them discover the bait he had laid.

"A tale of sound and fury, fury and sound, like those commonly told by idiots."

English. A simple language that nonetheless had its practical uses, especially when it came to interrogating Terran lifeforms. But while most of the Decepticons refused to lower themselves by speaking in the human tongue, Barricade held a certain fondness for its cadences and range of meaning that bypassed his fractured and fizzling logic relays and caused him to employ the human language even when not strictly necessary. He had also discovered that he preferred certain authors, most especially those that dabbled in darkness and deceit, weaving tales of melancholy and despair-- their inability to grasp the true nature of evil and the universe tickled him to no end. Especially Shakespeare, whose words he found to be almost as effective a tool as threats and torture when used against humans. Ah, such sweet irony.

"A good thing it signifies nothing-- there might really be a god, otherwise."

An irritated message pinged from his localized transciever as he spoke.

::If you insist on continuing to talk, it will be _you_, and not life, that is the idiot. I can shield our spark signatures from the Autobots, but they will still hear you speak::

Barricade snapped a jarring string of binary in return, replying in the closest Cybertronian equivalent he could find to a farting noise. His mortally wounded logic relays, somehow still limping along after so many orns despite the Virus' frequent and brutal scourings, informed him in a stuttering string of glyphs that it was illogical to try to imitate a human bodily noise-- and that the stealth-type did, indeed, have a point. But even attempting to start up his secondary processing unit sent a flare of agony through his systems--

((Action restricted. Hampering self-repair codes....))

--So he didn't bother trying to remove the illogical impulse. Just like his use of english and his preverted love of Shakespeare, it was better to accept the madness than to resist.

::Be it one your own head, then::

"I am a dyslexic agnostic insomniac. I lie awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog," he stated with a smug tone of triumph. If for some reason their plan failed and the Autobots failed to defeat the power of Unicron, Barricade wanted one more chance to enjoy himself before he was cast into the Pit with the sentimental fools, secrecy be damned. Besides, his own probability calculators-- untouched by Soundwave's ruthlessly efficient Virus for fear of making him less productive-- informed him that there was only a .98% chance that the approaching Autobots would pick up on his 3 decibal words and deduce that there was a hostile entity nearby. Without being able to pick up his signature on their sensors, they would never speculate that the softly uttered humans words (if they heard them at all) had come from a Decepticon.

::They are here:: the stealth-type radioed over a private channel.

Barricade's external sensors alerted him to the rapid approach of the Autobot medic and several human vehicles just as the short burst of communications data finished filtering through one of his side processors.

"Show time."

He studied the open ground visible at the end of the alley where he had carefully arranged his chosen bait. Lots of structural damage, executed in as flamboyant a manner as possible, had served to draw the sniper's intended prey to the city itself. But it was the seventeen humans laid out in an intricate pattern in the square that would bring the Autobot into his line of fire. Sixteen of the seventeen fleshbags were dead-- the last still lived, but only just. Lying directly in his line of sight, acting as the perfect lure, the pitiful creature moaned, an ominous gurgling sound coming from its chest. Not long ago its thrashing had settled, the pure energon he had pumped into its abdomen slowly but surely devouring it from the inside out. It wouldn't die for some time yet, but with every moment it weakened, its fractured pleas dying away as its organs rotted and dissolved. And just to add a dramatic flair, Barricade had cut deep lacerations into its limbs and torso, carefully avoiding the arteries that if severed would bring about a swift end, making sure that it would be drenched in enough of its own scarlet fluid to inspire horror while still avoiding a premature deactivation. Its screams had been delicious when the sniper first snatched the creature into his claws and introduced himself as Lucifer, as Beelzebub, as Abaddon, as Satan. Gently petting it before ripping into its flesh had created the sweetest data file of all-- a snapshot of the creature's face that he would savor for many vorns, its mouth open in instinctual fear but its eyes showing the first signs of tenative trust. How he had reveled in the passionate sting of betraying that trust.

A faint vibration rumbled through the ground beneath his feet as a proximity alarm went off in his processor, alerting him to the fact that the vehicle caravan had just entered the city limits. Rachet-- Autobot medic, repairer of bodies, restorer of souls-- led the way. Just as Starscream had planned, the multitude of simultaneous attacks had forced the Autobots to spread their numbers as thinly as possible, leaving each to investigate the damage with only a small contingent of humans for back up. Poor Starscream was intelligent enough that he might have actually amounted to something had he not been so absorbed in his own byzantine plans. As it was, the Seeker was so preoccupied planning the downfall of the Autobots at human hands that he had never even stopped to question Barricade's loyalty. Which, all told, was a good thing, considering the fact that Barricade had been relaying information to Megatron in order to bring about the ruin of the seeker.

Only Megatron deserved to lead the Decepticons. Only Megatron understood the sublime pleasures of torture, of facing down one's enemies and destroying them with strength and wit alone, reveling in the fact that even at their full strength they still lost. After all, what was the universe but a dark hole without pleasure?

Babbling human voices-- interspersed with gasps of surprise and revulsion-- arose from beyond his line of sight. Barricade would have loved to be close enough to record their beautiful expressions of fear. But alas, the sniper had work to do.

The sound of a transformation echoed from the buildings as human medics dashed into view, kneeling around the dying specimen and attempting to revive him. Deciding to play a little game with himself, the sniper started a countdown on his HUD. The Virus, in one of its darkly humorous moods, added a little smiley face to one corner. At times the Virus almost reacted like a separate conciousness, a demented personality nestled within his own-- a malignant seed, a tumor that both helped and hindered, spreading both healing and poison, always poison, destroying him and building him back up askew. He had lived with if for so long since the forced interface with Soundwave that they had become friends, in a way. A bond of mutual loathing.

Even now, the Virus continued to seep poison, smashing through the budding lines of code growing from the internal wreckage of his programs and pasting a smiley face on his countdown. Twisted little freak.

_"Blood pressure is still dropping. We need to stop the bleeding--"_

_"I've lost him! He's not breathing!"_

_"Get that bag over here, now!"_

Poweful scanners detecting the virulent poison of which the human medics remained unaware, Rachet burst into view, shoving a few of the fleshlings aside.

_"Move! Out of the way!"_

His countdown reached zero. Right on time. He knew the medic far too well.

The Autobot knelt to one side of the prone human, facing Barricade, his hands transforming as he went. Despite the shouted protests around him, he slit the dying insect's abdomenal wall and jammed a tube into his dissolving guts. A silvery liquid rushed up into the tube and sprayed out the other end, splattering harmlessly against the dusty earth. Energon removed, the medic drove a pair of needle-thin prongs into the top of his rib cage, a mild surge of energy jolting into the placid flesh and causing his back to arch from the ground. And to the other humans' shock, the dying man gasped in a deep breath, eyes flying open, and began to hack. Severely damaged, alien impliments stuck into his body, the fleshling was nonetheless alive. And knowing first hand the quality of Rachet's treatment, the fleshling would stay that way-- the spared sinner who would become Barricade's disciple.

::Why use energon?:: the stealth-type questioned, ::We have precious little of it as it is::

The message could have been accusitory, even livid. Instead, it was merely curious-- one psychopath investigating the methods of another.

_'What tangled webs we weave.'_

Barricade transformed one arm into a thin-barreled rifle. It was far too unwieldy to use in normal combat situations, but it never missed a target when striking from afar. Too bad his mission was only to injure rather than kill-- it would have been interesting to see exactly what fun places he could hit on the interfering medic in order to cause deactivation.

::As a reminder:: he sent back electronically, not willing to risk being exposed at this stage of the game by speaking, not when he finally had the chance to begin his revenge against the medic.

While Rachet worked steadily to stabilize the gasping human, oblivious to the concealed predators that watched him from the shadows, Barricade raised the knife-thin weapon and loaded his advanced targeting programs. Taking up far more processing power than those of the average Decepticon, the targeting programs running through the sniper's processors could hit the center of a bullseye fifteen miles away with only a .12 millimeter margin of error. With the medic only a few hundred yards away and completely unaware of his presence, there was no chance at all that he would miss. None.

::A reminder of what?::

This mission, this objective he needed to complete, would not even come close to satisfying his need for revenge. But soon, when the planet Earth lay barren and devoid of life, its seas crusted with the snows of a nuclear winter-- when the Autobots were utterly alone and without aid-- then, _then_, he would demonstrate to the medic the true meaning of pain. Give him a taste of the poison, let it consume him.

::Of the cruelty of mercy::

His targeting programs did not rely on data input from his optics-- he could have pointed the gun behind his back and blasted a hole through the stealth-type's chest without turning his head. But feeling in a mood for drama, he raised the keen black weapon and sighted down its length, moving the crosshairs from the medic's head to the shoulder joint of his right arm. He needed only to injure, not kill. Starscream was no fun. Oh well, maybe he could presuade Ravage to let him have a little fun with the Sam-creature before disposing of it.

The stealth-type did not react to his enigmatic comment, and his probability simulators indicated that it was likely-- given the nameless spy's ability to seemingly _know _things it shouldn't have known-- that the black robot fully understood the vehmence behind the blip of electronic glyphs. Just as it had known of Soundwave's plan to summon Unicron to Earth, it knew of the oozing wound in his spark, knew what kind of demon he had befriended, and precisely how it had come to be there.

With a twitch of his circuits, Barricade created and packaged the electronic command to fire, the single byte of data that would send a lance of energy shooting from the dark muzzle of the weapon his arm had become.

Yes. Soundwave, Soundwave, Soundwave. Two purposes to be fullfilled, two messages to be delivered, all tying back to the same creature. Wonderful, ironic symmetry. The communications officer was a paragon of insanity, a fanatic worshiperer of the darkness. Barricade could relate to the insanity part, but he worshiped no one and nothing, and not even the Virus could stop him from turning his cannon on his own head if it ever came to a choice between death and bowing to Unicron. And so when the Stealth-type had approached him, bringing news of the dark god's impending arrival, he had readily agreed to do whatever was necessary to stop Soundwave in his tracks-- including passing on a warning to the Autobots. The stealth-type had wanted him to simply carve the ancient symbol in the sand. But doing so would have been momentously boring. So instead, Barricade had killed enough fleshlings to construct the hidden warning with their bodies. Besides, a message was more effective when painted in blood. Now if only the Autobots were smart enough to figure out what they were looking at....

As for the second and more personal message, Barricade had been perfectly willing to siphon off a little energon in the name of chaos. Energon, it its unprocessed state, was extremely toxic to humans-- the fleshling he had poisoned would survive, but thanks to Rachet's 'helpful' intervention, he would spend the rest of his life in the grip of agony. Perhaps it would serve to remind the medic exactly what he had done when he supposedly 'saved' the sniper's life a millenia ago. And then, when the Autobot knew a full measure of regret as the weak fools always did, Barricade would give him a first-hand demonstration of the Virus he had left the sniper to be devoured by. A taste of madness. A taste of poison.

In a way he didn't really blame Soundwave, only Rachet. Though Soundwave had thrust the Virus upon him-- though he had torn ruthlessly into his systems, interfacing with him at the deepest level, and shattered the core around his spark-- though he had left Barricade with his own hellish brand of poison to ensure that he never healed, it was the Autobot medic for whom he held a hatred so powerful it melted his emotional cores and overloaded his processors. _Rachet _could have saved him from the Virus; _Rachet _could have deactivated him and spared him an eternity at its mercy. But he didn't. He'd left Barricade-- then a neutral-- to the cruelest fate of all in order to spare his own conscience.

So the sniper would wait until the time was right, until the skies had darkened and hope lay slaughtered in a ditch. Then, he would strike.

::We need to go:: the stealth-type roused him from his musings. A glance at his chronometer told him that he had been standing motionless, weapon armed and locked, for 2.13 seconds. Far too much hesitation to be acceptable. He would have to work on that.

((Purging surface readings from emotional cores. Wiping data pathways....complete))

The Virus sometimes had it uses.

Bringing his battle protocols back online, Barricade took aim at the Autobot's shoulder joint once more.

Soon.

Just wait. Soon.

"Dark dark dark-- they all go into the dark," he giggled, quoting T.S. Eliot, another of his favorites.

::All hail Megatron::  
The gun roared.

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Location: Moscow, Russia

Optimus Prime knew the instant Samuel James Witwicky left the confines of NEST headquarters in Diego Garcia.

A small, continuously looping program in one of his sub-processors pinged as the transmitter signal progressed beyond the boundaries of the base, sending an alert to his primary processor. But because the alert was only a notification rather than an alarm-- and a klaxxon would have begun to wail throughout his systems if the looping program had detected a Decepticon data bloc near the transmitter signal-- he shunted it aside for the moment to concentrate on the immediate threat before him. Though when he cycled the unfolding scenario through one of his situational routines, he realized that perhaps 'threat' was too strong a word to use.

Arriving in Moscow with a deployment of thirteen human soldiers, three human medics, six armored vehicles, thirty-two AKA-47's, nine sub-machine guns, and four sig saurs loaded with the experimental thermite projectiles, Optimus had expected to find Megatron himself tearing apart the city. The damage assessments that had been continuously flowing into his processors from the moment the attacks had first begun indicated that Moscow seemed to be the focus of the Decepticon mobilization. 3,756,778 battle simulations later, his logic relays had concluded that at least three Decepticons must have been on-sight to cause so much collateral damage.

Yet observing the scene before him, Optimus was forced to run a full systems check, concentrating on his external sensors and data processing units. All internal systems were running at 100%, and his physical/mobility structures only lagged behind by a 2% difference. Unless he had been infilltrated by a virus so complex as to make the destruction it wrought appear seamless, what his central processing unit was telling him matched reality.

Standing in blanket of snow 4.37 inches deep, awash in a gentle swirl of wet snowflakes that heralded an early Russian winter, Optimus retracted his ion cannon after a slight hesitation and activated a smaller weapon, one that would carry less force behind each blast. The soliders at his feet-- dressed in black winter gear, weapons held at the ready-- seemed just as confused as he was.

"....what the hell?" Epps breathed, taking a bold step forward, "Where are all the evil alien robots? And don't tell me that thing is a Decepticon."

Optimus surreptiously shifted his foot to prevent the Sergeant from approaching any closer. Though the odds were in Epps' favor with only a 32% probability that he would not be able to deactivate the awkwardly constructed drone busily tearing at the wreckage of a stone cathedral, Optimus did not want to take the chance that the mostly unthreatening machine would turn out to be far more dangerous than it looked.

"It is not," he replied, mimicry circuits introducing a touch of bewilderment to the words, "It appears to be a class D drone."

"And a class D drone would be...?" A female marine spoke up, throwing back her hood and relaxing her grip on the weapon in her hands, moving her finger from the trigger itself to the trigger guard. Though unlike Epps, she remained where she was.

"On Cybertron, there were many non-sentient machines created to preform monotonous and/or dangerous tasks. Class D drones tended to be larger; they were made to be slow-moving builders that would repair-- or, alternatively, tear down-- a city as they traveled through it. Most possesed no more intelligence than an earthen rat."

"Yeah, well, some rats can be pretty damn smart," a gangly man towards the back interjected. Rather than a gun, he held an advanced radiation scanner in one hand and a palm-pilot in the other. He waved the scanner in a loose circle around them, frowning. Nervous. "As far as I can tell, you're the only alien anywhere around here, Prime. That thing doesn't even register on the geiger counter."

Forcing down the growing anxiety in his emotional cores-- and painfully shunting aside another passive alert from the transmitter-- he brought the short-wave blaster extending from his arm online, stepping towards the drone. It didn't seem to register his presence, continuing along its bumbling way without pause.

"That is because it is not, in fact, Cybertronian. It is constructed from sheet metal and pre-made armature like that commonly found in human prosthetics."

Epps shuddered, briefly turning his gun from the drone to check their flank, expecting-- as Optimus himself did-- for an ambush to descend upon them at any moment, despite the lack of Cybertronian energy signatures. "There's _no way _this butt-ugly freak tore down Moscow and scared everyone here shitless. Man, my _dog _is bigger than that thing."

Optimus sincerely doubted that any species of dog in existence crested ten feet, but he understood and sympathized with the expression.

"A better question would be: Why destroy a city, then leave behind a slapped together drone to continue sorting through the wreckage?" The female marine speculated with a frown. Optimus focused briefly on her tiny form and scanned the skeletal structure of her face, comparing the data to NEST employee records. Ann Button, a marine for twelve years, specializing in covert ops and communications. A list of credentials a mile long. Intelligent. He sent a memo to his secondary processor to request her for his team more often.

No one seemed to have a solution to the conundrum.

Epps turned to him. "So what now? Do you want us to destroy it, or should we try to haul it back to base, see if we can get some info from it?"

"Wait, wait! Hold on. What if it's rigged to explode if we so much as touch it? Maybe that's the trap-- fool us into thinking that this drone is what all the fuss is about and have us blow ourselves up trying to get rid of it." The human wielding the radiation scanner-- Thomas Rein-- jogged forward, pulling a hand-held bomb detector from a pocket of his quilted jacket.

"That will not be necessary, Thomas," Optimus stopped him, "As it is not constructed from Cybertronian materials, my scanners are able to penetrate it quite easily. Fortunately for us, it is not designed to explode. And any attempt to transport it back to base would most likely be a wasted effort, as I doubt we could gain any useful information from studying it further."

"Cool. Then let's take the little shit out." Epps raised his gun to his shoulder, sighting down the scope. Optimus preempted him, stepping forward and firing his primed weapon into the drone's primitive head. The blast destroyed the flimsy structure entirely, reducing it to a few twisted pieces of scrap. The electrical currents charging its body abruptly cut off as the circuit was blown open-- the drone's headless body seized in mid-motion. Caught in an off-balance postion, it tipped ponderously to the side and fell with a resounding crash into the snow. Another detailed sensor sweep indicated that it was fully deactivated and no longer operational. He folded the blaster back into his arm.

Ann simply stared. "Well _that _was ridiculously easy."

78% certain that they were not in immediate danger of attack, Optimus accepted the newest alert and opened the data file it contained. After leaving NEST, the transmitter signal had apparently crossed either over or under the ocean to mainland India and had begun to travel one of the busiest highways at close to 120mph, changing direction twice in a short span of time. At the moment, it continued to race to the east.

His logic relays spun, processing the information.

The transmitter itself-- having been inserted into Sam's watch while he slept-- could not logically move at 120mph, even if the human ran as fast as he possibly could. Therefore, he must have acquired some sort of mechanized transportation-- the ease with which the signal moved from land to water to land again indicated that he had not ridden across the ocean in a boat, but had rather traveled by vehicle through the sea floor tunnel connecting the base to the mainland for use in emergencies. And while it was entirely possible that Sam was capable of driving a vehicle at such a daunting speed if desperate enough, his scenario processors indicated that it was unlikely that the boy had ventured out without an accomplice, especially given the fact that he would have needed to stop to dismantle the wall blocking the exit if he had been alone.

Snatching at his communications receptors, he sent a signal to Special Agent David Schwartz's cellphone. The signal bounced back, indicating either than the agent had not accompanied Sam, or else had left his cell phone behind to throw off pursuers. He sent another signal to the NEST PSAI mainframe, labeling the connection request priority 5, the second highest available. Almost immediately, the agent he sought picked up the phone, as if he had been waiting nearby for just such a call.

_"Prime, he's gone. Sam's gone."_

Tamping down a surge of fear and the beginning sparks of anger, Optimus turned to Epps.

"Excuse me for a moment. There is a small problem back on base I need to take care of."

"Got it. We'll contact the clean up crews and tell them to be on stand-by to look for survivors."

"Thank you."

Optimus moved away a few paces, extending his sensors out on the spherical plane to monitor for hostile activity.

::I have deduced as much:: he replied to the agent non-verbally, although the words emerged in his adopted human voice at the other end of the line. Despite his attempts at maintaining a cool facade, his mimcry circuits added a touch of harsh displeasure to his tone. Sometimes, their far-reaching control could be aggravating. ::How, precisely, did he leave? And under what circumstances?::

"_I'm not entirely sure _how _he left-- I was rendered unconcious while speaking with him, and when I awoke both my sidearm and jacket were missing, along with Sam. But all of the base personnel are accounted for expect for Wheeljack, which should tell you something. And as for why....Prime, something has happened to Mikaela. She and Sam were speaking when something forcefully disconnected the call-- something that caused her to scream bloody murder and may very well have left her dead."_

Optimus couldn't reply for a long moment.

He position in the war had left him intimately familiar with death in all its many forms. And as a leader, it was his duty to shake off grief, fear, and pain in order to move on and protect those that followed him. Sometimes the burden of being a Prime became almost unbearable; the mantle had long ago been forced upon him without his knowledge or consent, leaving him with a lingering sense of bitterness even thousands of years later. The chains of an unwanted duty chafed harshly at times, most especially in those instances when his deepest desires had to be buried in order for him to do what was right for the whole rather than for only one. Countless friends and comrades had died, some horrifically, but he had been unable to mourn them-- too many counted on their last Prime for him to falter. Fierce battles had left him badly damaged, aching and weak, but he had been unable to huddle in a corner to nurse his wounds-- his people were dying and they needed him, needed him now _now __**now**_.

And sometimes, like that snowy morning in Moscow, his duty hung from him like the weight of Cybertron itself for a far different reason. Sometimes, he longed in the deepest recesses of his spark to be anything but a Prime not for his own pain and grief, but for another's.

Optimus did not doubt the agent's interpretation of events-- he had hired him partially for his cool, clinical attitude and clear head. If the human said that Mikaela was in grave danger, possibly already dead, none of his logic relays would raise a protest.

Mikaela had always been a good friend and a relyable ally. He sent a silent prayer to Primus to spare her life, or to guide her human soul to its home if she were no longer counted among the living. His emotional cores pulsed with worry for her, and her loss would hit him as hard as the deaths of any of his close comrades had. But it was not for Mikaela that his defense/guardian protocols repeatedly attempted to come online even as he beat them back down.

Optimus was a leader. And as a leader, there were always choices he had to make, some unbearably difficult. His duty was to his soldiers and to the humans temporarily under his command, and to the earth and its people as well. Once the threat in Moscow had been neutralized to his satisfaction-- and it probably already was, as he suspected that the Decepticons would not return-- he would need to re-deploy himself and his team to one of the other attack sights around the globe. There we innocent humans in danger-- men, women, and children whose lives could be saved by swift intervention. Hundreds of them. _Thousands _of them. As a Prime, he had no time to spare on sentimentality; they needed to stymie the Decepticon incursion before it could fully begin and seek out the true purpose behind the bizzare nature of the attack on Moscow... and discover if it had been repeated elsewhere.

His processors and sub-processors said that his adopted home needed him.

His spark said that his new son needed him more.

Mikaela might have met a swift and brutal end-- but Sam had acted as an intimate witness to what could have been her last moments. Optimus knew the human loved her as he himself had loved-- and _still _loved-- his spark bonded. Even a Prime could feel pain, and the sort of pain the boy was probably experiencing at that exact moment was the most excruciating of all.

His logic relays prodded him with the knowledge that even if he _could _escape his duty and rush to Sam's side, he hadn't the faintest idea how to comfort him, or if the human would even accept his attempts at comforting. He wanted to leave the icy wasteland Moscow had become that very instant and fly back to India. He wanted to track down the transmitter signal and tear Sam away from Wheeljack, then do as he had originally intended and surgically implant the transmitter beneath the human's shoulder blade so he would no longer be left with only a blip of location data and could, instead, relax into the tender solace brought by the sound of a steadily beating human heart, able to heard from anywhere on the planet. He wanted to hold the warm body close to his spark and teach it to be unafraid of his touch. He wanted to kidnap him and take him far, far away where he didn't have to be Prime and where death didn't exist-- where Mikaela was still whole and alive, where Sam's soul was still unshattered. He wanted to protect him as he had failed to protect Bumblebee, wanted to make every scar and bump and bruise disappear. He wanted to show him the stars and the wonders of the universe-- he wanted to show him planets where the sky glowed orange and the plants were blue instead of green, wanted to enjoy the wonder on his small face as he saw the birth of a galaxy, the brilliant flash of a supernova. He wanted him to see the Cybertron that had existed before the war, take him to all the hidden places and show him the planet's beautiful secrets.

He wanted to be able to gently stroke the side of his face or pet his hair without having to watch him cringe in fear of the hand that could crush him without a second thought, a hand that could transform into a weapon powerful enough to level the strongest buildings and had torn countless thousands from life, a hand that wanted only to soothe the fragile creature.

He wanted to rip Megatron down to his atoms for hurting his son.

He wanted to destroy all the Decepticons, every single one, so that none could ever threaten him again.

He wanted to make it so Sam would never have to die.

But he could do none of those things, least of which because he _was _a Prime and it was his duty to protect the many...even at the expense of the few. And even if he had sufficient reason to try to rush to Sam's side-- even if the transmitter signal were suddenly lost, indicating that something had gone terribly wrong-- the storm that had drifted in over Moscow and its twin over India would prevent the cargo planes from flying back to NEST for some time.

He would have to trust Wheeljack. At least for the moment.

_"...Prime?"_

Optimus yanked himself firmly from his dismal mood. ::I assume Mikaela had left the airport before the event occured?::

The agent knew about the transmitter-- Optimus had informed him of his plan to insert it into Sam's watch after the boy had demonstrated a frightening inclination to run away in order to help someone in danger. He would make the connection that the Autobot was monitoring its signal, which was currently headed east, _away _from the airport.

_"Yes. She left in order to buy herself time in which to marry Sam. He had planned to use the loophole in the Geneva convention to allow her to move to NEST by making her his wife..." _The agent paused. Optimus said nothing, chosing not to react in favor of letting the agent continue with his explanation. He was hardly surprised that the two had decided to join-- had they been Cybertronian, the depth of their commitment to each other would have already resulted in the establishment of a spark bond. _"....Unfortunately, the incident occured just after the ceremony had been completed. He's not just out there looking for his girlfriend-- he's looking for his _wife_. It's going to be a hell of a job getting him to come back."_

As much as it pained him to acknowledge the fact, the danger to Sam at the moment was minimal. The nearest Decepticon attack was several thousand miles away, and with Wheeljack as an escort he was unlikely to be confronted with a potentially fatal situation. Logically, Optimus should have simply allowed him to continue on his quest to seek her out.

But with his defense/guardian protocols still snatching at his scenario routines and logic relays despite his best efforts to squash them, doing so was not an option. Another human might recognize him and attempt to apprehend him, or else he would encounter a rogue Decepticon or be injured-- possibly killed-- in a random accident. The only permissable recourse would be to order Wheeljack to bring him back to base no matter how strenuously the human objected. Later, once the Decepticons had been subdued, he could submit himself for use as a verbal punching bag for Sam's anger, even if the thought of being told exactly how much he was hated made him want to cower.

::I will make the necessary arrangements:: he informed the agent stiffly, and broke the connection.

Taking a moment to cycle the crisp air through his vents to cool his processors, Optimus glanced at the readings from his external sensors. Nothing more dangerous than a cat had appeared during the 46 seconds he had spent in conversation with David. Still exuding an aura of vague unease, the humans had moved to take up point around the ruined square-- two scientists took readings from the fallen drone while a ring of nine outward facing marines stood guard around them. The remaining humans, including the unneeded medics, had retraced their steps to their all-terrain vehicles and were currently trying to contanct the teams deployed in other cities, attempting to assess whether the drone in Moscow had been a singular phenomenon. The usual storm appeared to be hampering their efforts.

When his scenario routines had processed every byte of incoming sensory data and concluded that there was nothing which needed his immediate attention, Optimus pulled up his communications relay and opened the line connecting him to Wheeljack. He swiftly constructed a data packet containing the order to bring Sam back to base and sent it through the channel.

.000000162 miliseconds later, it bounced back at him, reflected from a temporary firewall. His logic relays whirred, spitting out the conclusion that Wheeljack was blocking his communications reciever. Carefully prodding the firewall, Optimus discovered that the block was selective rather than universal-- Wheeljack had cut off communications with _him _specifically.

Apparently, Sam had found a willing accomplice, one who would employ measures bordering on insubordination in order to help him on his search. Rather than defy an order outright, Wheeljack had simply made it so that Optimus could not give him an order in the first place. And because the engineer was classified as a scientist rather than a warrior directly under his command, he did not have the ability to forcefully removed the block around his communications receiver.

Again Optimus considered simply allowing Sam to continue with his search. Primus knew they could not spare the man power to hunt for Mikaela, so perhaps the human's hastily concieved plan would bear fruit and enable them to bring her back to safety. Every probability engine and scenario routine indicated that the chance of substantial harm befalling the boy was less that 6% while in the company of the engineer.

And maybe just a little bit selfishly, Optimus was loathe to pull him away from his wife and cause the human to resent him even further. He knew logically, rationally, that the boy could not continue to hate him over the course of several decades. But while in his company the hours did not seem like trifling grains of sand, but rather fleeting moments to be cherished. He didn't _want _to wait a decade or more for Sam to forgive him.

Reluctantly shutting down his communication relays, Optimus moved back towards the ring of humans. Epps glanced towards him briefly at his approach, then back out towards the ruined buildings, cocked weapon slowly panning left to right in search of potential threats.

"Man, I got a baaaad feeling about this," he mumbled, "If this ain't some sort of set-up, I don't know what is."

"But every piece of equipment we have keeps saying that we're alone out here," an unfamiliar marine spoke up.

Ann Button suddenly stiffened. "What if it's not an ambush? What if the threat isn't here?"

Optimus turned to her, processors jacking into high gear at the speculation behind her words. "What do you mean?"

"It's like the old bait-and-switch routine," her breath plumed as she spoke, eyes narrowing in thought, "Obviously a Decepticon must have done this to Moscow. But it left before we arrived, leaving behind a drone to make it look like something was still actively causing damage."

Epps hissed through his teeth in understanding. "That way we'd still haul our asses out here when there's nothing to find. I'll bet you anything those mutant piles of scrap pulled a stunt like this in every damn city they started to attack-- they're freeing themselves up to do something else."

Without warning, the female marine suddenly took of for one of the jeeps.

Epps spun to track her movements. "What the hell?! What's gotten into you?"

"It's not an ambush," she explained breathlessly, "All these attacks? They're not trying to level a few cities or spread us thinly enough to kill us off-- _it's only a distraction_."

"...oh _shit_!" Epps leapt after her, signaling to the other soldiers to pack it up and head out, ASAP. "They're going to attack the base!"

Optimus hesitated before transforming back into his alt mode, analyzing their conclusion. Logically it suited the current situation, and it was far from the only time the Decepticons had tried to draw them away from their base of operations in order to attack while they were otherwise occupied. Still reeling from the defeat in Egypt, they might have been desperate enough-- or fractured enough-- to attempt a large-scale invasion and strike at the heart of Autobot power on Earth.

And yet his intuition programs, far more advanced than those of most other Cybertronians, repeatedly countered every sweep of his battle simulators, forcefully denying the results that agreed with the humans' interpretation. They continued to whisper quietly in the back of his processor, pointing to the logical flaw of assuming that the Decepticons saught to attack the base-- as far as the Autobots could tell, the Decepticons did not know of the whereabouts of NEST. The inconsistent nature of the attacks themselves also unsettled him. No effort had been made to disable them and prevent them from returning in defense of the base, and unless the drone sent to roam Moscow had been defective and had failed to engage them in battle simply by accident-- unlikely, given that even the lowliest of the Decepticons was not deluded enough to believe that it could have caused any noticable degree of damage-- the Decepticons had left them untouched. Another inconsistency; they were not known for sparing their adversaries.

The entire situation did not sit well with him, though at the moment he could not devise another possible scenario to explain the bizarre string of events. But as he started his engine and drove to the head of the convoy, Optimus consoled himself with the knowledge that Sam would not be trapped within the base when and if an attack commenced. The human was safe as he could be lost in the crowds of India. Wheeljack would serve as an adequate temporary protector, and the Decepticons would not know where to search for him when they could not find him within NEST--

And the alarm he had hoped never to hear began to sound.

The driver of the humvee behind him shouted in surprise as his brakes suddenly locked, bringing his truck form to an abrupt halt.

No longer restrained, his defense/guardian protocols roared to life, sending a flood of data and mission parameters surging through his processor, reorganizing priority codes, shifting action/inaction commands to accommodate responses his processor had previous rejected as too radical.

He powered up his long range sensors to the maximum possible distance, stretching them towards the transmitter signal suddenly occupying the rapt attention of every primary and secondary system-- the faint pulses of data they could gather across the many thousands of miles confirmed what the transmitter signal itself had already conveyed, causing his defense/guardian protocols to flare and infiltrate previously untouched systems, locking into place to prevent deactivation.

The programmed transmitter alert continued to shriek through his internal systems, flashing over his HUD with a violent red light, a klaxxon wail of alarm far different from the nagging ping that had signaled Sam's earlier exit from the base. Because this time, the program loop wasn't merely informing him of a passive perimeter breach.

This time, the steady dot that represented Sam was not alone.

Swiftly approaching from the northwest and northeast, traveling at a speed low enough to avoid unwanted attention and yet fast enough to cross the twenty miles distance in a short span of time, two Decepticon signals closed in on Sam. One of them came with an attached data bloc announcing its identity as the High Protector.

Megatron.

_"Hey Optimus!" _Epps called over his radio, _"What's the deal, man? Have they already beaten us back to base?"_

Optimus accessed the weather map again, cursing silently as he realized the storm over India had progressed too far to allow them to immediately fly back to Diego Garcia.

"They are not attempting to infiltrate NEST."

But just in case, he pulled up his connection with the PSAI mainframe to confirm that the confines of the base had not been breached.

_"So then what the hell is going on?"_

Driving back to India from Moscow would be foolish and would certainly take much more time than simply waiting out the storm. But neither could he simply leave Sam to face his doom.

Unlocking his tires, be began to drive again, swiftly picking up speed.

"You are correct in that these attacks were only meant to be a distraction. But their ultimate purpose was not to facilitate an assault on NEST."

_"Still not making too much sense, big guy."_

There wasn't enough time to explain the situation revolving around Sam-- including how Mikaela most likely had been attacked to draw him into the open-- much less convince the soliders that the mindset of the Decepticons would encourage them to recklessly seek the boy's death rather than attack the base. He needed to act _now_.

Opening his communication network, he sent out simultaneous alerts to the Indian government and NEST headquarters, informing them of the Decepticon presence. Oddly enough the two signals had slowed and remained at a distance from the location of the transmitter, possibly awaiting the opportune moment to strike. But because of the Decepticons' reticence, it was entirely possible that a dispatch of humans-- hailing either from NEST or the local law enforcement-- could transport Sam to a secure location and protect him until the storm relented enough to let them land.

Possible, but highly unlikely. He needed to reach Wheeljack.

Since he himself could not contact the engineer, he would need to relay the message through another of his soldiers. Rachet and Ironhide would both be too obvious as substitute carriers and would probably be blocked, and in any case he dared not distract any of his soldiers from their missions, lest the hesitation brought by recieving and sending a message caused them to make a fatal error.

His only option was to attempt to reach Bumblebee.

Though Optimus doubted that he would be able to make contact, when he sent a location/status query to the scout's assigned link port in his communications hub, he discovered that not only had Bumblebee returned to the grid from radio silence, but also that he was not, as expected, buried deep within Nigeria. Instead, he was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, traveling in the direction of Deigo Garcia without heed to the danger the storm presented.

Optimus's processors reeled. Bumblebee had not sent a report on the success or failure of his misson to intercept the 'mirage'. Neither had he alerted them of his intention to return to base, although when Optimus accessed the PSAI mainframe he discovered that the scout had sent out a flurry of real-time data requests to the NEST databases.

But then, as he analyzed the requests themselves, he discovered the reason behind Bumblebee's abnormal behavior-- each and every data file centered in some way around Sam. There were even several hacks into the security cameras on the mainland around the entrance of the hidden tunnel, all dating from hours _before _Sam had left NEST.

Somehow-- either due to his partial bond with the human or through even more occult means-- Bumblebee had known that Sam was in danger, and was en route to rescue him.

_"Optimus? Hey, you still there?"_

A status/mission query aimed at the scout prompted nothing but silence. Determined to relay a warning to Wheeljack, a warning which only Bumblebee could deliver, Optimus established a looping relay that would send a status/mission query every .0048 seconds. Then, he turned his attention back to Epps.

"There is no immediate danger to the base, but the situation in London has yet to be resolved. We should depart at once to aid Sideswipe."

Though Rachet doubted its existence, Optimus knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans possesed a sixth sense when the Sergeant picked up on the hidden meaning behind his words and settled back into his job as a soldier without a protest.

_"Let's do it. We got jipped, and now I'm itching to kick some Decepticon booty."_

The cargo planes had deposited them just beyond the edge of the city before taking flight once more. As the caravan plowed rapidly through the cracked and desolate streets, Optimus sent a signal to the pilots that they were ready to be picked up. And after a short moment of hesitation-- and with a wrench of will that tore painfully at something inside of him-- he notified them to set a course for London, England.

"As am I," Optimus murmured in return, although the Decepticons _he _wished to destroy lay far away in India rather than in Britain.

Sam's survival now rested on chance and the scant abilities of a deeply scarred engineer. And maybe, just maybe, on Bumblebee, who still would not reply to the continuous stream of link requests pecking at his recievers. Yet he feared the lengths to which the scout would go to protect his newly bonded-- and what drastic action he might take should the worst occur. After all, it had taken no less that the combined efforts of four Autobots, including himself, to prevent Sideswipe from sticking his cannon inside his own chest cavity when Sunstreaker died in a crash landing shortly after the battle in Shanghai. And he doubted that Primus himself could have deterred Bumblebee from attempting to follow Sam.

Optimus wanted-- no, _needed_-- to protect them. His spark twisted and screamed for him to _save them_, draw a line in the sand and say 'no more' to death, it ends here, _you will not take these_, they are mine-- you have taken all the others, but these you shall not have. Take anyone, everyone, else-- burn down the cities and build towers from their bones-- but no more will you rob me of those I hold most dear, no more will I stand aside and watch them fall by your hand into the darkness from which there is no return.

Some part of him held out hope that if he could only save just those two lives, the chain would be broken, the legion would cease to advance, the wildfire would halt its all-consuming blaze, and no more would have to die after them. He prayed and writhed and sobbed for the chance to draw that line and hold it against the universe itself.

But he could not.

He was not a god-- he was as mortal and capable of dying as any human.

He could not defeat the impersonal power of a storm; he could not simply give an order and force the Decepticons to relent.

And he was a Prime. His duty came first. It always came first, as it ever would. There was no feasable course of action he could take to help his sons, and London and Sideswipe needed him to come to their aid.

Faith. Wisdom. Responsibility. The three creeds of every Prime, programmed into every system and processor when Vector Sigma had remade the greviously wounded Orion Pax into the savior the anicent robot had dreamed for his people.

Optimus didn't feel much like a savior, not when had done more killing than saving. But even had those three words not been a programmed imperative, he still would have adhered to his duty for the sake of the desperate and dying people who still looked up to him and expected him to be able to protect them, even when he sometimes felt unable to even protect himself.

He tried again to contact Wheeljack, but the block was still in place. Now, more than ever, it was imperative that the engineer be made aware of the danger. Once more he sent a priority 6 link request to Bumblebee.

Finally, after a total of 4,925 queries had pinged from his reciever, the scout reluctantly opened a channel. As soon as the connection snapped into place, Optimus hurried out an urgent message to Bumblebee, telling him to order Wheeljack back to base. No doubt he would do a far better job of 'presuading' the engineer than even Rachet-- after all, there was no limit to what Bumblebee would say or do to protect Sam.

Data file transmitted, Optimus settled back in his processor, watching his chronometer. Finally, after nearly 1.755 seconds had elapsed-- a far longer span of time than such a task would have ordinarily required-- the scout responded: Wheeljack had agreed to bring Sam back to base.

His emotional cores sagged in relief. There was some hope now that the engineer was aware of the danger around him and Sam. And if Bumblebee arrived in time to help-- if, Primus forbid, they ended up _needing _help-- the Decepticons would find that murdering the boy would not be quite as easy as they had originally thought with the scout there to defend him.

Optimus wanted to protect his sons and pull them out of harm's way.

But he could not. He could only trust in their ability to protect one another and continue on with the fullfillment of his duties. Because though he was a Prime, a ruler, a king, he was helpless to do otherwise.

Faith. Wisdom. Responsibility. The three binding chains.

A proximity alert interrupted the fragmented looping of his programs. Optimus eyed the cargo plane as it swept into view on his sensors and came in for a landing on one of the intact runways at the Moscow airport. His thoughts consumed by the turbulent tide of the thwarted defense/guardian protocols, he reached for the link port that had for so long lain dormant in his communications array. And ignoring the protests from his logic relays that there was no one on the other end to recieve the signal, he sent out a brief message into the blackness, shunting it down the truncated tunnel to nowhere.

::You were my beloved brother, once. But if you harm my human son again, the Pit itself will not offer refuge from me-- and this time, I will make sure there is nothing left of you to revive::

There was no answer. He had not expected one.

Night would not fall over Moscow for some time, yet a darkness had crept in that no dawn could hope to break.

Snowflakes, like silent watchers, continued to fall without comment.

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Author's Note: ....aaaand yet another example of a chapter that spiraled wildly out of control. This is really only half of the whole thing, because I didn't want to have a 40k chapter. Sets a bad precedent. So I found I good stopping place and chopped it off. But the good news is that I've already gotten ahead on the next chapter, so it shouldn't take nearly as long as this one to post.

And before I get flamed for taking two weeks to spit out this 'measly' chapter, may I remind you all that I was on vacation for a week? AND my life has been very hectic recently, cutting down the time I have to write. The next chapter should come fairly quickly, but after that I will be starting college, so my update speed is going to take a nose dive. I will try to have another one up every month (or sooner if I make the chapters shorter), but please don't bug me with e-mails saying 'are you dead?'.

Oh, and another thing-- LOG IN BEFORE YOU ASK ABOUT THE PROGRESS OF A CHAPTER, YOU LAZY BUMS!! That's not to say that I don't want annonymous reveiws-- I LOVE reviews of any sort, but I can't fill you in about how the next update is coming along if I have no way of getting in contact with you. And some of the badgering is really starting to stress me out. I WANT to get the next chapter up for you guys, but my fingers can only move over the keyboard so fast and there are only so many hours in a day, some of which must be devoted to sleep. Annonymous reviews are okay, but if you want a status report, leave me a way to reply. Please.

Ahem, on to story notes:

1) Yes, I took liberties with Barricade's character. But he's another one of those background mechs that only had two lines (the fact that he repeated one of them doesn't count), so I needed to expand. The writers themselves stated that they had cast him as a 'deceiver' (hence the cop car disguise) who enjoyed breaking the trust of others, so I decided to run with that.

2) Yes, I know this chapter is short. It's also a part one of two.

3) No, I did not make Optimus giggle like a school girl and throw confetti when he heard his darling boy had gotten married, because he already knew how much Sam loved Mikaela-- and on Cybertron, loving someone that much meant that you were as good as 'married'. Especially since the human ceremony doesn't really involve any physical bonding, only symbolic bonding. A mech would, for the most part, look at it and go 'Yeah, so what?'.

ONE MORE THING (No more after this, I promise)

Do you guys know of any contests I can submit this too, or other places besides I can post it? I'm technologically challenged and can't figure out how to put it on livejournal (*sob*).

Technical note: The shakespeare quote Barricade paraphrases is actually, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5).


	14. The Gathering Storm: Part 2

Midnight.

The witching hour-- a time when spirits and demons were thought to rise from the jungles around Lagos and prowl the outskirts of the city.

And sometimes, just sometimes, they really did.

A traffic patrol officer for nearly five years, Azi thought he had seen just about everything there was to see on the normally congested roads. Cars going in the wrong direction, day workers clinging to the sides of buses like barnacles, even one instance of someone attempting to drive a back-hoe through the middle of town. And while the dark curtain of night tended to chase most of the superstitious indoors and off the roads, every once in a while some loony would ignore the supernatural danger of night and try to make a sixty-year-old pick-up do 100mph down the pitted street.

Though by no means boastful, Azi was fairly confident that nothing would surprise him on that particular starry night. Leaning back in the seat of the dusty patrol car, he lazily surveyed the stretch of road visible through the windshield, nursing a luke-warm cup of coffee. Seated beside him in the driver's seat, his partner, Kayin, occupied himself with a crossword puzzle braced against his knee. Azi tended to disapprove of such things while they were supposed to be working, but even he-- stickler for the rules that he was-- had to admit that it didn't take two people to monitor the dark and decidedly empty road. The radar scanner propped up on the dashboard continued to read zero.

For a moment Azi hesitated, thoughts reaching for the book stashed in the bag at his feet, listening to its inaudible pleas to be read. Just five minutes-- just five little minutes to read to the end of the chapter, then he would turn his full attention back to the road. He had already waited all day to find out what would happen to the ink and paper hero-- surely nothing would happen in the short span of time it would take to satisfy his curiosity.

Had he simply reached down to pick up the book, he would have missed seeing the bizarre and miraculous event that occurred beyond the window in the very next moment. But he hesitated just a moment too long, glancing up through the window.

The sight that came and went beyond the glass in the blink of an eye caused him to choke around a sip of coffee, slopping the brown liquid all down his front.

Kayin, obviously having caught sight of the phenomenon as well, dropped his crossword puzzle to the floor and sat forward in his seat, spine ram-rod straight, jaw somewhere between his knees.

"Did you see that?" Kayin breathed in awe.

Azi didn't answer. Couldn't answer. All thoughts evaporated from his mind as his eyes drifted to the radar scanner and the new number it held.

"Whatever it was," he croaked at last, "It could not have been a car. I do not think cars can drive at 400mph."

Kayin spasmed slightly, jerking his head around to stare at the staggering reading embossed on the screen of the radar scanner. 439mph.

He swallowed thickly, reclaiming his slack jaw. "Do you think it could have been a low-flying jet?"

Azi shook his head, staring numbly out into the night from which the apparition had come roaring along the highway. He should have started the car; he should have engaged the sirens and given pursuit. But somehow he doubted that the rusty patrol car could have caught something going that fast.

439mph.

The speed of thought. The flash of a benign spirit rushing to work a miracle.

The blur of demon chasing it prey.

439mph. No earthly vehicle could move so fast.

"Somehow I doubt that they would paint a jet bright yellow."

Kayin stared at him with hooded eyes, and Azi knew that the same thought echoed through both of their minds.

'No one is going to believe this...'

* * *

Time.

The fourth dimension. An objective, measurable phenomena calculated by the gradual breakdown of carbon atoms. And, to 99.99% of all Cybertronians, as innocuously neutral as the measurement markings on a human ruler-- simple numbers that possessed neither the ability nor will to change in relation to subjective stimuli.

**6.59.43**

Yet for Bumblebee, time had suddenly become an enemy as tangible as Megatron, a sentient force intent on fleeing from him faster than he could race to catch it, accelerating up his chronometer at a speed that had been unthinkable before encountering the Stealth-type.

**7.01.22**

It should not have seemed so. Repeated internal scans reported that no glitches had appeared in his logic relays that would force his secondary processors to attribute an independent will to something that so clearly _could_ not, _did_ not, posses one.

**7.02.36**

But like so many other things that had occurred since his arrival on the small, watery planet, those problems, situations, circumstances that _could_ not, _should_ not come to pass in an ordered, logical universe somehow....did.

**7.02.57**

The Allspark had been destroyed. The Matrix had been recovered after having been lost for so long to the enshrouding mists of legend. The Fallen had returned.

**7.03.00**

A human named Sam had smoothed his soft, organic hands across his hood.

**7.03.04**

That which was never meant to be had occurred.

::My friend, my brother, my bon-- no!::

Terminating program loop. Rebalancing protocols

**7.03.06**

And now, it seemed, time had adopted a malevolent life all its own.

**7.03.07**

Too long. Far too long.

A twist of hidden servos, a shift of metalloid cells, and Bumblebee squeezed another jolt of acceleration into his Cybertronian engine.

**7.03.16 **

If only he could have risked dropping his terran disguise, the trip from the warehouse would have taken seconds, not minutes. Keeping to a paved road would not have been a problem. _Gravity_ would not have been a problem.

**7.03.37**

But if he were spotted-- if a traffic camera or helicopter or errant human with a recording device happened to catch a non-terran form on some sort of electronic media-- then he could be followed. And reducing his time in transit was not worth the risk of leading further danger right to the one he was trying to protect.

**7.03.50**

A proximity alert flashed across his HUD, and Bumblebee took a hard right, skidding down the hidden drive that would lead to the military airfield outside of Lagos. Core processors running at maximum capacity, data screens continually feeding information to logic relays and situational analyzers and millions of scurrying background programs-- wind resistance, friction, load capacity, fluid dynamics-- he forced his terran disguise to its limits, eyeing his chronometer with something approaching panic.

**7.03.56**

His sensors stretched out before him, combing the human base, cataloguing defenses, searching out terran heat signatures, assessing threat levels. Various battle programs reported that the effort involved in entering the base would be minimal at best, sighting the two humans stationed in the guard house 72.88 meters away as the only significant obstacle. A swiftly packaged data burst easily disabled their communications.

**7.03.57**

The entrance to the airfield appeared on his visual sensors at the same moment the heartbeats of the two guards spiked erratically. They had spotted him.

**7.04.00**

And exactly 7.04.01 minutes since the stealth-type had delivered its cryptic warning, Bumblebee smashed through the barbed-wire gate barring the entrance to the hidden base, steel crumpling around his frame without leaving so much as a scratch.

7.04.01 minutes lost. 7.04.01 minutes wasted on transforming back into vehicle mode and driving the 53.2 miles to the Nigerian airfield; 7.04.01 minutes that had been spent somewhere other than at his charge's side.

Unacceptable.

Time gave a cruel laugh.

If the V8 engine his Camaro frame normally housed had still existed beneath his hood, 7.04.01 minutes would have been an impressive time indeed to traverse the required distance. But given that every component beneath his terran shell had been transformed into a Cybertronian propulsion system of the highest caliber, 7.04.01 minutes was far from adequate. Sam was in danger-- any length of time measuring more than a few milliseconds was inadequate.

Even when his situational analyzers assessed the threat level of a given circumstance to be minimal, Bumblebee preferred to remain no more than .66 seconds away from his human charge. Normally, even a 3.5 second distance between them was unacceptable-- an infinite host of lethal possibilities could occur during the interval when he could not place himself between the human and an oncoming threat. And even factoring in mitigating circumstances-- such as the presence of other Autobots-- anything more than a minute was out of the question.

Yet now the scout found himself coming to terms with the fact that Sam, despite all his efforts, still remained many hours away. In an effort to save as much time as possible, Bumblebee had forgone sending out a rendezvous request to the pilot operating the cargo plane scheduled to fly in and retrieve him as soon as he sent the word. The time it would take for the human craft to reach him and then ferry him back to India would be almost double the time it would take to fly to India himself.

So at the urgings of his newly reconstructed logic relays and the powerful sleeper program, Bumblebee decided to do the only thing he reasonably could do in order to save Sam.

He decided to hijack a plane.

Casting a localized scan out behind him to ensure that the two human guards-- after discovering that their radios and phones didn't work-- had begun to give chase, Bumblebee locked his breaks and spun across the black-top, tires squealing, engine roaring, and turned his car form towards the startled guards.

Without giving them the chance to raise their weapons-- or even to skid to a stop as he suddenly reversed direction-- the scout leapt forward and fishtailed towards the taller of the two. Fine-tuned programs blinked to life, calculating the exact amount of force it would take to render the human unconscious without doing the delicate creature undue harm.

The guard uttered a short cry of alarm, throwing up a hand to shield himself, as Bumblebee spun sideways into his unprotected form, knocking him from his feet. Swiftly made adjustments to his trajectory and frame ensured that none of Bumblebee's tires grazed the human as he slipped beneath the car body, skull impacting the asphalt with precisely the right amount of force to induce a state of unconsciousness. For a moment his morality programs raised a feeble protest, but the all-consuming need to protect Sam swiftly overrode them.

Every millisecond counted. If one nameless human needed to be given a concussion to grant him a few more, then so be it.

The second guard jerked in fear as Bumblebee spun to face him, eyes darting fearfully to his still companion. He staggered back from the snarling machine facing him head on, leveling his projectile weapon at the scout's windshield, aiming for the non-existent driver whose absence he could not discern through the opacified glass.

"You are trespassing on government property!" The human shouted, standing his ground, "Stop where you are, or I'll kill you!"

The words would have sounded more menacing if they weren't pronounced in broken english. And if the guard's arms weren't trembling slightly, causing the gun barrel to waver.

Bumblebee revved his engine, deepening the pitch to produce a low, dangerous sound analogous to a guttural snarl, and switched on his radio.

_'I will survive!_'

With a flicker of code, Bumblebee shot forward. The human cried out, a surge of adrenaline much higher than the safely acceptable level flooding his veins, and tried to flee. Faster by several orders of magnitude than his quarry, the scout easily overtook the human, darting past him and letting an open door catch him in the back and send him tumbling to the asphalt.

Turning again, Bumblebee jerked to a stop, front bumper level with the frightened creature's face as he flipped onto his back, struggling to push himself to his feet.

The guard froze, breath feathering across yellow paint in a strangled gust, eyes wide with terror. Flicking a brief medical scan over the human, Bumblebee momentarily hesitated, wondering if perhaps it would be better to leave the human unmolested rather than risk causing permanent damage to render him unconscious. The time it would take for the tiny creature to race towards the other humans stationed in the myriad hangers and observation towers (all of whom remained unaware that anything amiss was occurring on the airfield thanks to a viral program carefully inserted into the base's outdated mainframe) would give Bumblebee ample opportunity to remotely access the computer of one of the cargo planes, start the engine, and load himself into the back. The human need not be harmed more than he was.

But then the guard scrambled back away from Bumblebee, bringing up his gun to aim for the driver's side windshield once more despite the danger-- greater at such close range-- of being hit with a reflected bullet. And Bumblebee realized that leaving the human to his own devices would not be an option, not when the trembling creature appeared determined to fight rather than flee. Though his battle simulators assured him that the threat posed by the lone human and his primitive projectile weapon was all but negligible, his probability relays warned that leaving the guard to chase after him would most likely cause the scout to lose precious time protecting the human from himself.

So with a slight, internal wince of shame (one that was all but cancelled out by the alarms flashing across his HUD that wailed with glaring red digits that he was almost out of time), the scout snatched at his transformation controls, activating the familiar reversion program.

The guard's mouth fell open, gun sagging towards the ground in his suddenly lax grip, as the scout shifted back into his Cybertronian form. Gross mobility circuits briefly left his control as his body unfolded itself from its condensed form. Automatic triggers activated at every miniscule joint in rapid succession, each sliding piece forcing those next to it to change their shape and arrangement the way a falling domino would start a chain reaction. Legs shifted into existence and took the place of wheels, thunking down onto the blacktop and pushing him upright. Armor clicked along its ratcheted grooves and locked into place; surface struts melded together to protect vulnerable inner circuitry.

When at last his battle mask retracted and the final piece rotated into place, Bumblebee lowered himself into a crouch, hovering above the prone figure of the guard, and carefully stretched out a finger towards his chest. A small burst of electricity would suffice to induce an unconscious state, leaving the human with virtually no pain upon awakening, unlike his companion. Though he loathed the necessity of harming such a vulnerable creature, it was a necessary evil to protect Sam. Bumblebee could not afford to be detained by a group of humans.

At the urgings of the sleeper program (whose functions seemed to encompass shifting his actions to appear more human) and his morality programs, the scout clicked on his radio as his metal digit brushed the front of the guard's uniform and warbled softly, _"It will all be over soon..."_

In retrospect, probably not the best line to use.

As when dealing with Sam and Mikaela, his actions were designed to induce a release of oxytocin in the human brain, a chemical that promoted the formation of trust. But unlike Sam and Mikaela, the guard had never seen a Cybertronian before and thus was inclined to interpret his actions-- as all humans seemed predisposed to do-- as indicating that the scout intended to offline him, especially since his partner had just been run over (and, to all appearances, killed) by the selfsame robotic organism now reaching for him.

Another surge of adrenaline flushed through his system, and the guard redoubled his grip on the gun, bringing up his other hand to steady the weapon as he snapped it towards Bumblebee. Rather than stammer out another ineffectual warning, the human coiled the muscles in his upper body and squeezed off three rapid shots.

Reaction relays momentarily unbalanced by the decisive, unexpected action, Bumblebee did not shift away in time to avoid the projectile rounds. For all his biologically apparent terror, the human possessed remarkably good aim-- though the first shot went wild and sailed off into the night, the second bounced from his right shoulder plate. The third hit him squarely in the head, nicking him between the optics, and deflected with a sharp crack into the asphalt at the human's feet.

Though the scout's self repair functions reported that only minimal surface damage had been incurred from the projectile, a powerful background program momentarily overrode the functions of his central processor in response to the sudden attack. Scrolling alerts and steadily humming long-range sensors abruptly shut down, windows blanking from his HUD, as a secondary processor that had lain dormant for almost two years came online with a violent whirl and a searing flood of red light. Like the sleeper program, the secondary processor was self-made, cobbled together from copied lines of code and unused circuitry pathways. But unlike the sleeper program, whose influence was subtle, its purpose unknown, the frankenstein processor that suddenly seized control of his every movement, every thought program, was far from mysterious, and not at all ambiguous about its function.

Danger alerts started to wail throughout his systems as a buried memory file spontaneously opened and began to play, reviewing for his intimate horror the night a swarm of humans had overtaken him and dragged him away. Bumblebee knew, from long, leisurely talks with Sam, that a running memory file was nothing like a human nightmare. He felt none of the pain that had settled into his joints with the terrible cold, sensed no imperative to protect Sam and the all-important glasses he carried. His legs did not seize with phantom attempts to flee; his damaged vocalizer did not screech out an attempt at pleading with his captors. Yet it was a potent reminder of the danger humans posed-- a reminder that his flaring processors jabbed repeatedly into his logical relays, his situational analyzers, screaming that the organic creatures were cruel and simple-minded and would not hesitate to tear him down into pieces of scrap if given the chance.

Logic protested feebly that it was only a single human before him, that his primitive weapon would not be able to damage the scout in any meaningful way.

But the rotting, festering, dark place inside him where logic could not reach-- the place which had spawned the secondary processor in order to survive torture at the hands of the Decepticons-- boiled over with fury....and fear.

**Level five threat detected. Engaging battle protocols**.

His battle mask extended; his left arm shifted into an ion cannon and began to charge.

**Deactivate.**

**Deactivate.**

**Deactivate.**

A short, trembling, strangled sound broke through the stillness, cutting off the memory file. Bumblebee started, and at once the paused memory file folded up and sealed itself back away in his data banks, clearing his HUD as swiftly as a human blink would sweep away a mirage. The pulsating secondary processor suddenly froze, withdrawing its influence, and his core processor reasserted itself and locked away the errant program deep within his hardrive. The red tint to his HUD faded; threat alerts ceased to bombard his primary processors.

And Bumblebee was left staring down at a cowering human, ion cannon primed to blow out its chest cavity and cause instant death.

The dark-skinned guard was not Sam-- his bio-rhythms, brain waves, and DNA did not match--

**No spark signature detected. Only one bond currently active: Human, designation: S--**

::No!::

**Program loop terminated**.

((Reaction illogical))

--but the human cry of terror stirred another memory, one that brought shame instead of fear, aching sorrow rather than anger, and shut down every impulse to destroy as efficiently as instantaneous stasis lock.

He had almost murdered the innocent creature.

.....just as he had almost murdered Sam.

::Forgive me::

Slowly, so as not to frighten the guard further, Bumblebee pulled back and retracted his cannon. And, after a slight hesitation, he flipped up his battle mask.

Not wanting to give the human another chance to fire his weapon, the scout extended his newly reformed palm towards the guard, activating the electro-magnetic field around the appendage and polarizing it. The human flinched back, jerking his weapon up to fire another shot. But before his tiny finger could depress the trigger, the attractive force put out by Bumblebee's hand ripped the gun from his grasp, transferring to the robotic palm.

Feeling no remorse whatsoever for the primitive weapon, the scout contracted his fingers around the gun, effortlessly crumpling it, and tossed it over his shoulder without once taking his optics from the stunned guard.

The human cringed away, holding up one hand as if the flesh and bone shield could provide any protection from the scout.

"W-what are you?" he whispered.

**7.04.51**

Unchangeable.

Unavoidable.

Unacceptable.

_'Your worst nightmare._'

The guard emptied the contents of his bladder.

"Please don't kill me."

Humans could, at times, be confoundingly illogical. The fact that he had not yet become a warm, greasy smear on the blacktop should have been proof enough that the scout desired something other than his death. Though the persistence of gratuitous torture on the part of the Decepticons was a strong argument in favor of cautiousness in the face of an unknown individual who may or may not have wanted to carve out your optics for sadistic pleasure.

Unwilling to waste the 2.3 seconds needed to respond, Bumblebee straightened from his crouch and lashed out at the guard's head with one foot. Though hardly as gentle as a concentrated electromagnetic burst would have been, the blow did not connect with enough power to crack his skull or even to draw blood. The human went limp the instant cybertronian alloy touched his temple, eyes rolling up in their sockets.

Conducting a brief medical scan as he stepped away, Bumblebee assured himself that no permanent injury had been done, calculating that the human would awaken in approximately 13 to 15 terran minutes. If all went well, more than enough time.

**7.05.12**

Briefly accessing the map of the base stored in his hard drive and locking onto the coordinates of the nearest cargo plane, Bumblebee transformed back into his terran form, tires bouncing slightly from the speed with which he threw himself towards the ground. 1.17 seconds to shift from bipedal mode to vehicle mode. A record time.

Not fast enough.

**7.06.29**

Now that the human sentries had been dealt with, there was nothing to prevent him from racing across the patched airfield towards his target. Smoke rose from his tires as he accelerated away from the fallen human, secondary processors broadcasting his own unique pirate signal that would enable him to hack into any sufficiently complex terran device. But as he came within thirty yards of the row of planes-- the beginning of the range at which his own systems could seize control of their onboard computers-- a startling revelation dawned, one which caused his logic relays to suddenly stall and his emotional cores to pulsate ominously.

During the scout's harried scan of the base only 3.47 minutes earlier, he had programmed his receptors to indentify and locate any aircraft large enough to contain his bulk. Upon discovering three such vehicles that matched his criteria, Bumblebee had turned his receptors-- and concentration-- to the monitoring and communications equipment of the humans guarding the base.

Now the scout realized that he had made a critical-- and, for Sam, potentially fatal-- error in not initiating a more in-depth scan of the base's air craft.

His vehicle form slowed to a crawl, rolling into the shadow of the nearest dilapidated aircraft. After a long, aching moment, he shut down his pirate signal.

It was hardly of any use to him when none of the planes waiting on the airfield had been used since 1945 and the conclusion of World War II-- their computers could not be hacked for the simple fact that they did not possess computers to begin with. And without some sort of cybernetic guidance system that Bumblebee could use to remotely start the engines and pilot them back to India, they were as useless as the inert hunks of metal they appeared to be.

**7.08.34**

Wildly, desperately, Bumblebee opened a powerful scanning program and cast his receptors around the entirety of the base, sacrificing several megabytes of processing power that normally went towards threat detection in order to thoroughly comb his surroundings. Save for a pair of F-22's collecting dust in the northern hanger, an H3 hummer parked inside several rows of barbed wire at the base of the observation tower, a Nintendo DS in the pocket of one guard sleeping in front of an instrument panel, and a few dozen cell phones scattered around the base, there were no devices available for Bumblebee to hijack, much less any that possessed a pair of wings and the load-bearing capacity to lift several tons of cargo.

Every probability simulator, every logic relay, every minor processor momentarily paused in its workings as the enormity of the situation flooded his processor: there was no way-- no avenue he could take, no advantage he could exploit, no machinery of any description that he could use-- to get back to India. There was no way for Bumblebee to fly to Sam.

::No.::

**7.08.36**

When the glitch that had caused his systems to freeze for .002 milliseconds had passed, the scout immediately began to reassess his options. Remaining in Nigeria-- remaining away from Sam-- was a situational possibility that never once factored into his 3,451,009,722 action/inaction scenarios. But the only two courses of action open to the scout were almost as unappealing; call the NEST pilot circling over Africa for transport....or search out another airfield. The later-- if possible-- would undoubtedly be the most expedient. But if a C-17 or its equivalent could not be found within 100 miles of Bumblebee's current position, he would have no choice but to radio for assistance, an action that would cost him several hours.

Unacceptable.

((Unchangeable))

**7.08.55**

Throwing himself into reverse, Bumblebee began to power up his sensors to their utmost extent in order to scan for any private airfields that might not have been listed on the official military database. Filling away the internal shudder of fear rippling from his emotional cores, the scout stolidly resigned himself to a minimum ten minute delay, once more lamenting his ready acceptance of the mission to Lagos. If only he had not allowed fear to dictate his actions he would not have inadvertently placed himself several thousands of miles away from the one he was meant to guard over and protect with his very existence.

If only he had realized sooner that he could no more abandon Sam than he could turn back the racing hands of time.

Every second-priority background system momentarily paused as Bumblebee sent a level four scan wave pulsing outwards, receptors straining out on a 360 degree plane parallel to the ground to search for any working aircraft in the area that would suit his needs. Reems of data poured in as the scan reached its maximum range and his receivers reset to their original configurations. But as byte after byte of useless sensory data flooded across his HUD-- as inch by inch across the 1.1 thousand square miles combed he remained without a means of transport-- the readings from his probability simulators began to shrink. And when at last the final blip of data from his scan had filtered through his processors and every probability simulator hugged 0, Bumblebee found himself without a means to fly to his charge.

**7.09.47**

Stymied once more, the scout locked his wheels to arrest his tentative backward progress, lunging for the slot in his communications array that would link him to a secondary mainframe of the NEST PSAI. There was no other option. He would have to wait for transport to come to him.

Sending out a transport request signal to the C-17 pilot, Bumblebee sank down on his shocks and prepared to wait, forcefully clamping down on the erratic whirling of his processors that threatened to spiral into a data storm of fragmented code and overheated cores. But unable to contain the frantic urging of his systems entirely, Bumblebee blindly threw out a scan and discovered that the cargo plane assigned to him had flown beyond his range. A side program informed him that that meant it would take, at minimum, 1.34 hours for the C-17 to even arrive. If Sam were not in immediate danger-- if the Stealth-type's enigmatic warning did not reach fruition for some hours yet-- then such a delay was aggravating but not overtly destructive. If, on the other hand, the danger approaching Sam were imminent, 1.34 hours would toll his death, never mind the time it would take simply to fly across the Indian Ocean.

And if his human were already fighting for his life, 1.34 hours would make no difference at all.

**Emotional core fluctuation-- initiating shunt.**

**Terminating program loop--**

**Error. Termination incomplete.**

**Termin--**

((Alive. Safe. Listen, _feel_))

And feel he did.

Disconcerting waves of cerebral patterns-- distinctly human and disturbingly familiar patterns-- flittered briefly through his processor before Bumblebee was able to force the sleeper program back into his secondary systems. And even after his HUD had cleared of the momentary influx of alien data input, the sense of _otherness_ remained at the edges of his core processor, whispering to him with words he could neither hear nor break down into their elemental code. Like the sleeper program itself, the sensation seemed to simply not exist. A rapid systems check revealed that there were no errant programs that could have caused the phenomenon. The scout could not decide whether to be comforted or frightened by that fact.

Yet though he shrank away from the conclusions brought on by his certainty that Sam still lived (much to the consternation of his logic relays and the disapproval of the sleeper program) the awareness of another presence-- close not in physical space but in some other manner he could neither classify nor adequately explain-- served to calm a portion of the panicked alarms wailing across his HUD.

Dark, unnamable things lurking in that festering place deep within his spark stirred in response to his contentment. Bumblebee hurriedly locked them away before the thoughts that had caused him to flee from India--

((From Sam))

--overwhelmed him again.

**7.09.52**

The issue of what might have resulted from his attempt aboard the aircraft carrier, however preemptive, to heal Sam using the energy that normally repaired his own body could wait to be examined until after his charge was safe. Then, and only then, would the scout concern himself with the possibility of a pre-spark bond....and how to break it.

**7.09.56**

Time was once more his enemy as each moment stretched and lengthened as Bumblebee waited for the pilot to respond. It left him vulnerable to discovery by the other humans on the base when, eventually, they came to investigate the reason for their fellows' refusal to answer pre-arranged radio check-in's. It also allowed dozens of cognition programs to bombard him with questions, doubts, regrets.... fears.

::No:: Bumblebee shuddered away from action/inaction scenario 3,448,001. ::I am his guardian. If nothing else, I am his guardian::

The dark things flexed their claws and grinned.

**7.10.01**

Unwilling to linger on the idea he had considered for .000001 milliseconds after the Stealth-type's warning, the scout's processor returned again to the possibility of contacting the other Autobots. But after only a moment's hesitation he again discarded the thought as futile and potentially counter-productive. Radioing NEST with the impromptu announcement that Sam was in mortal danger would necessarily result in an inquiry into where, exactly, he had obtained such information. And as the Stealth-type had so keenly observed, no one would believe his story about the cryptic warnings of a Decepticon. Not even Optimus. Especially Optimus, who knew only too well the irrational hysteria that could overcome a spark-bonded Cybertronian. Though Bumblebee still clung fervently to the belief that he had not, in fact, initiated a spark bond with Sam, Ratchet believed it to be a strong possibility. And Optimus trusted Ratchet's opinion implicitly.

No, radioing the Autobots for help would only be a wasted effort at best and a distraction of their attention from Sam at worst. The scout was on his own.

**7.10.18**

A proximity alert suddenly began to warble, refocusing Bumblebee's attention on the flashlight beam that had begun to pan back and forth across the asphalt 102.3 yards off to his left, accompanied by the rapid jabber of a human voice and the pained squawking of a disabled radio. Without starting his engine, Bumblebee inched forward until he was completely concealed from the revealing moonlight beneath the outdated aircraft's shadow. He was almost out of time. Even taking human response time into consideration, there was a noticeable lag between his broadcasted signal and the as-of-yet undelivered reply.

**7.10.24**

**Warning. Estimated destruction imminent. **

A continuously scrolling countdown in the corner of his HUD suddenly began to flash, warning him that his predictions of how quickly he would need to reach Sam were swiftly approaching fulfillment.

There had been no way for him to know, of course, precisely what danger his human charge was in. Or even if that danger were immediate. The Stealth-type's warnings had been vague at best, and there existed the possibility-- slim though it was-- that the Decepticon had deceived him for its own ends. Ceaselessly cycling probability scenarios had presented him with every possible threat imaginable, calculating the mean time for those threats to reach completion and steal the life from Sam's body. When each of the various routes to death-- 7,801,923 in all (and that was only the ones with more than a .01% chance of actually occurring)-- had been complied together, their average resulted in several different time spans which had each been placed into a separate countdown tucked into a corner of his HUD. The first several countdowns had expired long ago-- spontaneous combustion, earthquake, drowning-- and now thirteen more were spiraling rapidly through their last numbers on their way to 0. Thirteen more ways in which Sam could possibly die were about to reach their conclusion.

((Energy waves in equilibrium. Bond stable))

**7.10.43**

Several more flashlights lit up in the darkness, closing in now from three sides.

**Countdown complete. Subject destroyed. **

Thirteen chances for life winked out.

Bumblebee sent out another transportation request, wishing-- illogically-- that the simple blip of data could convey his desperation.

((Is not the very existence of the soul illogical?))

**7.11.05**

Worried shouts rang out as the first approaching human stumbled across one of the fallen guards. The scout knew he would have to move, and soon. But if he moved, the pilot might not be able to lock onto his signal.

Yet if he stayed, he would be in real danger. The guard's hand gun might not have been able to cause much damage, but the ballistic missiles mounted atop the human's vehicles _would_.

**7.11.26**

A thin beam of artificial light stabbed beneath the hulking metal plane and alighted on the scout's gleaming yellow finish, eliciting a cry of triumph from the human.

_::SAM!::_

**7.11.33**

At long last, a message pinged from Bumblebee's reciever. But to the scout's dread, it was an automated message from the NEST mainframe rather than from the C-17 pilot.

**Pre-recorded response logged.**

**Arranged transport temporarily unavailable-- all NEST aircraft and ground vehicles in use.**

**Reason: NEST deployment in (26) areas.**

**Autobot status: Unavailable. **

**NEST personnel status: Unavailable. **

**Estimated return time: Unknown.**

**Have a nice day.**

::Primus, no.::

**7.11.41**

The asphalt beneath his tires rumbled as half a dozen armored vehicles burst out from behind their gates and began to race towards him, accompanied by a cacophony of alarms wailing, voices shouting, safeties clicking off, booted feet running, rocket launchers powering up.

Bumblebee's battle simulators screeched that if he stayed in his current position he risked a 94.2% probability of serious injury or deactivation. Several possible scenarios for escape presented themselves, but all that involved any real chance of escape also included the death of at least one human. The frankenstein processor whirred and raged and tore at his core systems, pulsing with a heavy darkness, demanding to be given free reign regardless of the toll on innocent lives, regardless of the mates, the children who would feel the mortal stab of agony upon finding their beloved dead. And despite Bumblebee's loyalties—despite his deeply held beliefs and convictions—he knew that Sam mattered to him more than any of them, more than all of them. They were as a single drop of water compared to dark, unknowable depths of the ocean that was his devotion to Sam.

But the knowledge that the scout's friends, allies, brother-in-arms were all in very real danger--- that Sam would most likely die if Bumblebee could not reach him-- shut down the impulse to kill more effectively than stasis lock. There was no point in fighting for his freedom if freedom could not help Sam. The 26 simultaneous Decepticon attacks meant not only that he could not use NEST transportation, it also meant that any and all C-17's in Africa would be in use fighting off the incursion. Even if he traveled from coast to coast he would not find one available to be commandeered, and attempting to drive across the sea floor would take almost a week, if he made it at all against the 97.001% probability of failure.

The darkness inside of him grew and spread, crushing Bumblebee beneath its weight like a tangible thing. There was a human word for it: despair. And for a moment he considered simply allowing himself to be offlined and dismantled. That way, if by some chance Sam survived, the human would at least be free of the spark bond. Free of the darkness. Free of the festering taint.

Free of the monster.

((What is the nature of the soul?))

**7.12.38**

The armada rumbled closer.

_"Don't move! Don't move!"_

_"You are trespassing on government property!"_

_"Step out of the car with your hands on your head or we will shoot!"_

_"Get out of the car! Now!"_

**7.13.09**

::I love you::

**7.13.12**

((His faith will be your faith))

7.13.33

"_Out of the car!"_

((Belief will inspire. Determination create))

**7.14.45**

((The ability rests within you. You simply have yet to discover it))

_"This is your last chance!"_

**7.15.56**

((Cybertronian and human together as one. Look. _See_))

**7.16.00**

The sleeper program flared to life, and for the first time Bumblebee did not attempt to stop it. Swirling, chaotic code drifted through his processor with the disorganized brilliance of stars, of glowing sea anemones-- on the surface no more than random disorder, but created from a pattern so complex that its entirety could not be seen or understood. Cognition programs opened and began to whirl through reams of seemingly unconnected bits of data, selecting and discarding portions of unformed ideas seemingly at random, fitting them together and rearranging them according to some unknown blueprint that he both understood and failed to fathom-- an image whose final shape he would not know until he had assembled it. A background processor nudged him quietly, whispering that he was experiencing the human phenomenon of free association, the same mental process often linked with the incredible leaps of intuition found in dreams. A mental process that no Cybertronian, except perhaps Optimus or Wheeljack, possessed.

Bumblebee's sensors ranged out, seemingly beyond his control, fleetingly touching humans, weapons, vehicles, aircraft, adding encrypted data to his processor-- more pieces to the puzzle. Then, all at once, they alighted on the Zero, a Japanese fighter jet from WWII, sitting on a patch of grass behind the group of humans as some sort of memorial. His primary and secondary processors refocused on the outdated human aircraft, and suddenly Bumblebee knew what to do. There was a way out after all.

**7.17.08**

_"Open fire!!"_

Just as the first human finger tightened around a trigger, Bumblebee sprang into action.

A level five scan directed at the Zero momentarily blinded the humans with its brilliant flash, giving the scout the milliseconds needed to erupt into his bipedal form-- already leaping up and towards the humans while still in the process of shifting-- as familiar transformation protocols opened and began to assimilate data, calculating adjustments. A flurry of deep, pulsing signals shivered along his frame, reaching for each metalloid cell and instructing it to release the bonds it held with its neighbors in order that new ones be formed.

A hailstorm of bullets tore through the air in his wake, most thunking into the outmoded aircraft that had served as his shelter or sailing harmlessly off into the night. A few, however, managed to zing along his armor, leaving shallow dents and furrows, and one managed to nick a coolant line in his knee, though the damage was minor enough that his internal repair systems had almost finished sealing the break by the time the scout touched down on the other side of the line of humans.

While still rolling forward with the impact, Bumblebee activated the freshly constructed transformation program, sending off a brief prayer to Primus or God or Sam that he not meet his demise attempting the impossible, that the long-held belief that only Seekers could fly was more propaganda than truth, that he would be fast enough not to be blown away by a human with good aim and a rocket launcher.

Following the single glyph command, the scout felt his reversion stabilizers engage, felt his parts begin to shift, rotate, rearrange as his armor faded from bright yellow to burnished silver, and with what remained of his legs he leapt up from his rolling crouch and launched himself as high as he could into the air. There was a moment of terrifying freefall as his engine started up and his propeller began to spin, but then his newly formed wings caught and held the dark mass of the air, flinging him upward in a roaring haze of bullets and mini flak clouds and plumes of fire that bit at his tail even as the snarling engine nestled deep within his newly transformed body ripped him from the reaching fingers of death and flung him up into the black sky.

Directing his sensors behind him to the group of humans swiftly falling away with the rest of the planet, Bumblebee examined his battle scenarios and came to the conclusion that it was highly unlikely that they would attempt to give chase, especially not with his fight path directing him towards the border. He was free, and not a single human had had to die. If it ever came down to a choice between killing a human-- even killing many humans-- or losing Sam, the scout would willingly become a murderer. But so long as such a choice was not a necessity, Bumblebee would cling to his duty as an Autobot and a follower of Optimus Prime and attempt to preserve human life whenever and wherever he could.

The darkness retreated beneath the glimmering light of steely determination taking root in place of despair. He would save Sam, or he would destroy himself trying.

A flicker of code, and the cartoon decal of a hornet appeared from the rippling armor of his tail amid the scout's wash of animalistic-- _humanistic_-- triumph.

And as he set course for India, Bumblebee's core processor was momentarily filled with a sense of ironic amusement as he realized that Sam's first assessment of his nature had finally come to pass-- now, at least, his charge could truly say that his alien guardian was 'Japanese'.

* * *

Riding a motorcycle, Sam decided, could have been pretty fun.

If only said motorcycle wasn't an alien.

And if only said alien didn't seem determined to make him die of a heart attack before he turned twenty.

En route to the hospital Mikaela had been brought to (--'yes, Sam, she is still alive, they're unloading her now'--), traveling at a ridiculously insane speed with nothing between him the other cars-- and certain death-- but air, Wheeljack decided to pull another Live Free Or Die Hard on him.

_"Will you cut that out!"_ he screamed, to no apparent effect, as the motorcycle did a complete one-eighty at 120mph in the middle of rush hour traffic. Another brain-melting, bowel-loosening game of chicken with several dozen cars later, Wheeljack crossed back over the median into the stream of vehicles traveling in the right direction. Or rather the _wrong _direction, as Sam was completely positive that the hospital and Mikaela were falling away behind them as they raced back the way they had come.

"What are you doing?! Turn around! --But find a place to make a u-turn, first."

_"I'm sorry, Sam," _Wheeljack whispered to him through the helmet, _"But I can't do that."_

Sam wondered if the alien knew how much he sounded like the homicidal A.I. Hal when he made that comment.

"Sure you can! Look, there's an off-ramp coming up right there--"

_"Being able to change direction is not the issue," _Wheeljack cut him off, voice thrumming with something that sounded almost like tightly controlled terror.

Sam latched onto the emotion behind the words, heart stuttering in response. It felt swollen, too full of blood, every pulse a stab of pain (--_Mikaela!--)_

"They've come back for her, haven't they," he breathed.

_"Sam--"_

"Oh God, I was right. The Decepticons caused the accident and now they've come back to finish the job!"

Sound abruptly assaulted his ears, piped from the hidden speakers inside the helmet—voices talking, laughing, arguing in exotic tongues that sounded like complete nonsense to Sam. The familiar, breathy overtones of someone putting their mouth too close to a microphone that colored each blip told him that he was listening to Indian radio once again.

_"Sam,"_ Wheeljack soothed,_ "If they had already found her, it would have been obvious by now."_

Listening to the boisterous, disconcerting, but altogether normal sounds of human voices-- voices belonging to people who clearly were relaxed and not shitting their pants over a Decepticon attack on a hospital-- Sam reluctantly had to agree. But the way the engineer had inserted an 'already' into his sentence sent alarms jangling fearfully through his head. Not 'already', but maybe _'soon'_. (--no no no!--)

Blind terror surged through him, causing him to shudder against the bike.

"We have to go back! We have to get her out of there before they can find her!"

He wrenched at the handlebars, trying to manually turn the bike around, but the front wheel refused to budge so much as an inch. Like with Optimus, he might as well have been trying to yank a piece of granite apart.

_"We cannot go back."_

And the thin, dry stick of his patience snapped.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?! Goddamn you, _turn around_!!"

_"No."_

The single word was so curt, so final, and so utterly infuriating that he felt tears of helpless rage gathering at the corners of his eyes. But he knew continuing to shout at the alien would get him about as far as pushing against a stone wall-- he had to use logic and reason. Appeal to Wheeljack's robotic sensibilities.

"I guess I'll just have to walk, then."

Well, okay, so maybe logic had nothing to do with proposing to dismount a motorcycle while it traveled at a speed to outpace a rocket, especially since any attempt to lunge for one of the other cars would most likely leave him a grisly little pool of road pizza. But it was hard to think logically when your partner in crime suddenly got cold feet and proposed to leave your new wife (dude, I'm _married_!) at the mercy of sadistic, demented psychopaths whose whole bodies could be used as instruments of death and torture.

Floating on a hysterical cloud of reckless abandon, he tried to swing one leg over the seat in preparation for a grand dismount and heroic lunge for the car in the next lane. But Wheeljack intercepted him before he could get very far-- the metal under his legs shifted, dozens of delicate mechanical arms detaching from the smooth planes and twining around his calves, hooking into his jeans, holding him fast to the motorcycle.

With a snarl, Sam tried to kick out of his bonds. The grip of the tiny appendages was unbreakable-- he could neither shift his legs from side to side nor pull them straight up. Gently, inexorably, Wheeljack held him in place, risking being discovered to keep him from fleeing.

"That's it! We are _so _not friends anymore!"

_".....I am so very sorry, Sam," _the engineer murmured, _"But we must return to base at once."_

"Why, because you're too much of a _coward_ to risk running into a few measly Decepticons?" he snarled, some small part of him whimpering in shame as he said the words. But unlike when he had mercilessly laid into Optimus, the greater part of him did not simply _stand _on its top-priority pedestal--it bashed the whimpering part over the head with it. Mikaela was in danger. Politeness could go merrily tripping down the path to Hell.

If a motorcycle could cringe, Wheeljack would have been a mewling pile of robotic despair.

_"Because Mikaela is not the one the Decepticons are after.....they want you, Sam."_

Feeling a little in the dark about the cause of the engineer's sepulchraltone-- every word sounding as though he had to dredge it up from the bottom of the ocean-- Sam could only blink stupidly at the instrument panel. He had always known the Decepticons were after him-- it was a constant state of existence for him, as all-encompassing as being a guy, that had persisted without interruption ever since a certain yellow Camaro had appeared in his life. Sure, maybe it had become a little more urgent since Egypt (--can't go home, never go home--), but it was nothing for Wheeljack to suddenly freak out abo---

No. Please no.

"Y-you mean it was all a set up? This whole thing was staged just to get to me? B-but the accident--"

_"Was not truly an accident," _the alien confirmed softly, _"It was only a ploy to lure you into the open, away from our protection....and it seems that it has worked."_

Dizzy, breathless, he leaned heavily against the handle bars.

"N-not really. If it had worked, they'd have already chopped us up and stuffed us into chunky tuna cans." He tried to chuckle, but the attempt fell flatter than a pancake, as non-funny as a visit from the IRS, as, as.....the very really possibility of actually being killed and chopped into bite-sized pieces, not necessarily in that order. "....How many?"

Wheeljack did not need to ask what he was referring to. _"Two."_

"Little ones?" he guessed hopefully, thinking of Frenzy.

_"Big ones."_

"....how big is big?"

_"Megatron big."_

"Oh."

The speedometer inched past 150.

_"But luckily they do not seem to know exactly where we are."_

A cold sweat broke out all over his body-- icy fingers of moisture ran down his spine.

"That's good."

160.

At least they were after him and not Mikaela. At least she was still alive and safe at the hospital. The Decepticons didn't want her. Even if they killed him, she was nothing to them. They had no use for her---

Use for her.

But they _did _have a use for her. A very important one.

"They'll use her to get to me," he whispered breathlessly, "They've probably been watching her this whole time, waiting for me to show up."

Wheeljack sighed, seeming to brace himself. _"Sam--"_

"But when I _don't _show up, they'll go 'Hey! Let's break a few more bones and see if he'll come when we broadcast her screams over every radio channel in the area!'"

A shiver ran through the bike frame-- the restraints around his legs twitched as if in pain.

_"I know this is hard--"_

"They won't just leave her alone, oh no. Because for a bunch of evil alien fruit loops they're fairly smart-- she's an asset, a useful tool, and why would they throw away a tool when they can use it?"

_"Remaining in the open would be tantamount to suicide--"_

"And in this case, a tool they can use to get to me. --Don't you get it?!" he suddenly shouted, the well inside of him overflowing, "Those creeps will tear down the hospital to get to her, squishing nurses and sick people right and left along the way. And then they'll hurt her--"

_"Trying to face off against two Decepticons unaided is just not feasible--"_

"--They'll cut her open with their knives and dig creepy alien meat hooks into her body," his voice cracked dangerously, "They'll stick needles into her eyes and leave them there, then shatter her bones and joints--"

_"...Please, Sam--"_

"Then, just when she's all tenderized like a human smoothie, they'll start to skin her alive, starting with her fingers and toes. --Or maybe they'll leave the needle-in-the-eye thing for last so that they can make her watch them pull her apart. They'll do everything possible to make her scream and squeal and cry and beg--" though his eyes remained narrow and flinty, a traitorous tear of imagined pain crept down the side of his nose, "--and they'll make sure I'm listening to every minute of it, telling me that I can save her if only I come back to them."

Wheeljack's voice went stiff. _"I have been ordered to bring you back by whatever means necessary."_

Sam nodded. "And the Decepticons will use whatever means necessary to make me come, in this case by hurting Mikaela. They think that I'll try to save her."

_"I will not allow you to go."_

But Sam wasn't listening. As he spoke, he slipped his right hand into his jacket, curling his fingers around the grip of the gun hanging against his side. Luckily it was his left arm in a cast-- he would never have been able to pull off the stunt forming in his mind had his dominant hand been compromised.

(...hold on Mikaela, hold on just a little bit longer....)

"They think that I'll try to save her," he repeated lightly, swallowing the knocking lump of apprehension in his throat. He needed his hand to be steady. "And you know what?"

In a single motion Sam tore the gun from its hostler, for once not suffering from terminal klutziness and dropping it altogether. He pointed the muzzle towards Wheeljack's front tire.

"They're right."

He pulled the trigger.

Thankfully the weapon contained only ordinary, human-stopping bullets-- the single round, even fired at point-blank range, was not powerful enough to pop the tire or do any serious damage. But it did, however, accomplish his purpose.

Taken completely by surprise at the sudden attack, Wheeljack startled on his shocks and forgot to lock the front wheel in place when Sam grabbed the handlebars and yanked them hard to the left with every scrap of strength he possessed. The alien had not been prepared for the unexpected turn-- rather that whip around in a terrifying yet perfectly controlled circle, the bike turned too far and threatened to fall to the side. When he tried to turn it back the other way to compensate, it started to wobble dangerously, weaving drunkenly back and forth against the traffic.

His guardian angel returned from his smoke break just in time to help him dodge through the lines of cars blowing past, darting to the side of the road. And still moving at close to 80mph, the bike smashed sideways into the concrete curtain that suddenly appeared from the grassy shoulder as the highway transitioned smoothly into an overpass bridge. Sparks flew from the side of the bike as it scraped along the short wall, metal squealing in protest. Pain erupted in his calf as flesh met concrete with only denim in between, tearing a short scream from his throat (--oh god, oh god, it _hurts!_--)

His cry must have shocked Wheeljack back into his sensibilities (or else the wall hurt the engineer's spindly appendages as much at it hurt Sam) because a shiver suddenly went through the bike frame beneath him-- a tangible wrenching of control-- and jerked sharply away from the concrete curtain.

But Sam, anticipating such a moment and determined to escape the alien, dove in the opposite direction.

The strain of the two opposing forces broke the grip of the restraints, causing his legs to pull free. He went sailing through the air, clipped his shins on the low wall (--#_%$*&!!!-_-) and tumbled over the edge of the overpass.

In hindsight, probably not the smartest thing he had ever done. Flailing his arms, croaking/shouting/squealing something unintelligible and (to his embarrassment) probably high-pitched and girly, Sam could only watch the ground rushing up at him with the detached realization that it was going to hurt like hell when gravity finally gave him a rude introduction to the asphalt below. If he didn't splat like a bug on someone's windshield first.

All-too-familiar terror welled up in his chest, clogging this throat, strangling him as his body dropped like an oddly shaped rock through the air. Suddenly, Sam _knew _that he was going to die. He could even see how it would happen in his mind-- landing on his head, neck bending beneath his weight at a sickening angle until his spine snapped, and finally being crumpled around the front bumper of a Honda or Mitsubishi, flipping up over the hood and smashing into the windshield, leaving a Sam-shaped impression in the shatter-proof glass.

(--_God, please don't let me die! I have to save Mikaela_!--)

Ten feet, seven feet, five feet, so close he could see the individual rocks pressed into the asphalt, so close, too close, closer, I can't die I have to save her _I have to save her_--

::_Bumblebeeeee!!!!::_

**Accessing emergency survival protocols.....**

**Uplink achieved.**

**Downloading....**

And time stopped.

....or so it seemed at first.

The ground was still rising towards him, still close enough to touch, and though Sam knew that if he counted out the seconds _one-one-thousand two-one-thousand _they would come out to be the same length as always, he suddenly had an infinite amount of time to think between one second and the next. Like during his super-soldier moment at the firing range, the processing power of his mind had suddenly increased a thousand-fold.

Except this time, he wasn't the one in control.

Alien symbols began to scroll up, down, and sideways before his eyes, twisting and recombining, strangely organized and not at all similar to the chaos of his Allspark induced seizures. With bone-deep certainty he realized that they were not just inert fragments of a map, but rather complex programs-- programs that surged down his spine, into his limbs, and took control of his body as effortlessly as a puppeteer pulling the strings of a marionette. If he concentrated, he could almost feel them wriggling beneath his flesh like so many tiny worms (--wires--), clamped around his joints and vertebrae like enormous hands that brought numbness instead of pain, gripping his mind, his body, with limitless strength that simply slipped in and pushed him aside.

Sam felt the programs flip his body in midair-- a demonstration of acrobatics and flexibility that would have been impressive if not for the fact that he was riding sidecar in his own skin-- in order to reorient his legs beneath him. His legs bent, body sinking into a lithe crouch, just as the ground slammed into the undersides of his feet. The shock of impact rippled through him, from the bones in his feet to the tip of his hair, luckily failing to break or dislodge anything other than the programs. As a bucket of ice water to the face could wake a drunk from his stupor, so too did falling fifty feet help break the grip of whatever new alien freakishness had wormed its way into his mind. The programs were still there, still pulsing through his muscles (--through his spine, his heart, his _brain_--), but for an instant Sam was able to fight against them.

And fight against them he did, interrupting the smooth roll the alien glyphs tried to direct his body into. Too much weight landed on his shoulder-- Sam cried out as he felt something give a disgusting pop and shift out of alignment. But still he struggled, more terrified than he could ever remember being, the acrid bile of animal fear rising in his throat.

**Actions illogical**.

**Resistance to survival protocols hampering injury prevention**.

--_Don't be afraid_--

As swiftly and easily as a rebooting a computer, the programs smoothly reasserted control, correcting the trajectory of his body and rolling him out of the path of an oncoming car and off the edge of the road. Still straining against the foreign hijacking of his body, Sam shocked himself into a full-body jerk when the programs abruptly relinquished control, retreating into his mind. Using the forward momentum of his body to flail himself into something approaching an upright position, Sam staggered away from the roaring stream of cars, gasping, choking.

"It's in my _head_," he croaked, "it's in my _head_. Get it _out_..."

Stumbling forward, half blinded by shifting symbols, flashing colors, Sam fumbled at his injured arm and clutched it close to his body.

**Self-correct dislocated appendage?**

"No!" he groaned, reeling, still feeling as though he were falling and knowing only that he had to get away from the bridge before Wheeljack came after him, "Get _out_!"

But the programs-- the _thing_, whatever it was-- didn't leave. As his thoughts shifted to the engineer he felt them grab at his mind, working through what little data his alien-enhanced senses could provide to calculate Wheeljack's probable arrival time and the best course of action to take should he wish to avoid such an encounter. But what creeped him out the most was that the information didn't appear before his eyes, like the glyphs (a phenomenon that he was smoothly informed was merely a glitch that would be resolved as the structures of his mind were further refined to be 'compatible'-- though to be compatible with _what, _he didn't know). Nor was it spoken in his mind like some sort of internal PA system. Rather, it was simply _there_, like a loud, intrusive thought that could not be ignored. But unlike his own loud, intrusive thoughts, the programs were altogether unfamiliar and distinctly _alien_, like cool metal brushing softly against his mind, grabbing at his consciousness, everywhere and nowhere all at once.

"_SAM!_"

Shit. Wheeljack.

The sound of his name instilled a new sense of purpose in Sam, sending him reeling forward into an awkward lope away from the bridge. If the engineer decided to risk exposure and transform there would be nothing he could do to get away. Long legs+alien stamina=Sam losing race. But maybe if he could hide---

The sound of a train whistle caused his head to snap up. Eyes blinked and strained, stoically resisting the urge to snap closed when his vision sudden telescoped and zoomed in on the graffiti-covered freight train approaching in the distance. The tracks weren't far away. If he could just get to the other side before Wheeljack came or the diesel engine turned him into a human pancake.....

**Running probability scenario....**

**Complete. Chance of success 67% without assistance. **

**Chance of success 92% with assistance.**

"Assistance? What the hell does that mean?" Sam murmured quietly, trying not to look like the lunatic who argued with himself despite the fact that there was no one close enough to overhear. He twisted his head to scan the overpass, twitching back with a hiss of apprehension as he saw an all-too-familiar white robot drop nimbly over the edge of the bridge into the bushes by the side of the road.

"SAM!"

"Ah, great."

A disconcerting internal nudge.

**Assistance requested?**

"Sure. Great. Whatever. I would just really like to be on the other side of those tracks right now. Preferably _before _Mr. Spastic Fantastic catches me or I get creamed by an Indian freight train!"

Still limping drunkenly forward, wobbling from the rumble beneath his feet caused by the barreling train, Sam was again startled into almost needing a new pair of underwear by the feeling of once more being a passenger in his own body. But this time, when the feeling of wires descended, it was more akin to being tangled in a cobweb than being bundled in a cocoon-- like having a guiding hand on his back rather than being picked up, flung over an invisible shoulder, and carted away fireman style. His sense of balance immediately returned, as did his coordination. He started forward in a jog that morphed seamlessly into a sprint, more focused, more graceful than he had ever been during track meets or running from Megatron.

But despite his sudden burst of speed, the train was moving far faster than even his alien-guided legs could manage. His heart started to knock loudly against his ribs as though trying to break out and escape the foreseen fate as a human pancake assigned to the rest of his body. There was no way he could make it.

"It's too close!"

**Chance of success 97% **The program insisted. **Threat level acceptable**.

The rumbling of the train grew louder, transcending noise and becoming a concussive force that beat relentlessly against the sides of his head, rattling his teeth in his skull.

"_Yeah, well, I think this counts as the 3% range!!"_

"SAM, STOP! _PLEASE!"_

The note of sobbing, agonized terror in Wheeljack's voice made him hesitate, causing him to slow minutely as his heart constricted for an entirely different reason. But sensing his moment of weakness, the program snatched control of his body once more, coiling the muscles in his legs, bringing his hands forward in preparation to jump.

"SAM!!"

And with the roaring freight train so close that he could feel himself being buffeted by the cushion of air pushed along before it, Sam felt the program plant his feet and launch him into the air with every scrap of strength in his body, lunging for the other side of the tracks.

* * *

Author's Note:

Ta-da! I'm back! Missed me?

This is probably going to be a very long author's note because there's a lot that needs to be said about this story.

First, chapter notes:

1) Still not slash. Don't go getting crazy over the 'L' word.

2) As some of you smart people probably noticed, the first scene with Bumblebee stepped back a little in time to BEFORE Optimus tried to contact him. At first I was going to write the inevitable freak-out scene, but I thought explaining how Bee became a plane would be way cooler than just using a flashback thingy.

3) This chapter was originally supposed to include more material, but I'm coming to find that my outlines magically expand during the writing process, making one whole chapter into three. And no, I won't tell you whether Sam makes it or not—where would be the fun in that? But seeing as how he IS the hero, he's going to end up surviving…one way or another…..

Now for personal notes (excuses). Feel free to skip if you want.

This chapter was a long time in coming first and foremost because I lost inspiration. The plotline was still there, but the fire I had first felt had retreated to mere embers. I WANTED to write, but couldn't seem to make myself, and the more I viewed it as a chore the less I wanted to write. College also played a hand—that semester was the equivalent of a brief internment in Hell.

For those of you who don't know, I feel it only right to inform my loyal readers that I am sick. Very sick. And I don't mean the cold/flu kind that's caused by germs. I have been in and out of the doctor's office for the past three months and even had to make one trip of the hospital. No one could figure out what was wrong with me—we _still_ don't know. Rest assured that I don't have cancer or anything else most likely terminal. Right now it looks as though I'm going to keep right on living—it may be painful, it may be inglorious, but I'll still be alive. But this illness/malfunction/whatever has been the cause of some very dark moments these past three months, so dark that I don't know if I will ever be able to share them with anyone. I don't want to touch that kind of pain—both physical and spiritual—ever again.

I know some of you have probably learned to hate my guts for such a dry spell, but in my own defense I would like to humbly submit that it is almost impossible to concentrate on anything besides breathing when enduring weeks of that kind of mental and physical agony. I'm shocked that I even managed to do my homework, much less make a 4.0 while having to deal with that. So I'm sorry that Instability wasn't undated during that time, but frankly it just wasn't on my radar.

I love this story and don't want to let it go until I finish it, but be warned that another long dry spell may come if/when my illness resurges. If I don't get to see you guys again, just know that you're the best fans in the world and one of the only bright spots in my life.

God bless you all, and may He always light your way.

--Steelfeathers


	15. The Gathering Storm: Part 3

There was something about near-death experiences that made Sam look at life in a whole different way.

Food tasted better, for one- only hours after melting Megatron down into scrap metal with the Allspark, Sam had found himself scarfing down powerbars and field rations like they were the ambrosia of the gods. Every scent, every flavor exploded in his mouth like fireworks, causing him to send up mumbled prayers of lustful thanks for each and every bite.

Colors, too, looked somehow brighter. He remembered how Mikaela's eyes had never seemed so brilliantly aglow, like polished steel, as they appeared silhouetted by the fading Egytpian sun. Her lips, too, had been painted a shade of scarlet to put pomegranates to shame when she leaned in to kiss him. (Well, okay, so he'd never actually _seen _a pomegranate, but he couldn't have told her he thought her lips were as red as Mario's hat when she asked him what he was staring at, now could he?)

But aside from thinking cold pizza was better than a five star meal or looking up at the sky and wondering when it had become so blue, the thing Sam remembered most about the moment after brushing by Death without falling victim to His scythe was the sound of his own heartbeat. Such a small thing, in retrospect. Yet that steady lub-dub deep inside his chest (which tended to beat out a staccato rag-time no cardiologist would think healthy in the heat of the moment) had felt as blissful, as awe-inspiring as being brushed by fluttering angel wings. After the roaring of the guns had ceased, after the monster had been destroyed and the valiant hero resurrected from his metal grave, for several long seconds all Sam had heard was the sound of his own heart.

There was something else about near-death experiences that Sam had learned from encountering more than the average number of them over the course of two-something years- they never got dull.

Sailing through mid-air, blinded by the 1000watt headlamps so close to his face he could feel the delicate hairs on his cheek singeing, every thought drowned out by the impossibly loud roar crashing over him like a tidal wave (-_don't think, don't feel- run, __**jump!**__-)_, utterly cold and alien programs scuttling wildly through the back of mind his like so many icy spiders, Sam knew he would either be able to check off another item on his 'Creative ways to get an adrenaline rush' list or would very suddenly go SPLAT on the front of the train.

Probably not the best time for the sane part of his mind to pipe up with 'oh shit, this is going to hurt'.

Air thundered against him with invisible fists as his muscles clenched like steel cables pulling taught- nothing for it but to hold on with mind and soul, willing himself to _fly_- and suddenly there was a high, keening screech, a scream of denial, that pierced through the sound of the train, but he couldn't tell whether it was the brakes or Wheeljack or his own lungs making the sound (_everything crushed together, an instant of decision, the fulcrum of fate, the knot from which everything would come together or unravel_)-

-And abruptly, violently, the ethereal crystal of disbelief encasing his mind shattered. The fog of

adrenaline evaporated beneath the terrible light from the headlamps rushing towards him, leaving him reeling, gasping, choking, his heart trying to beat itself out of his chest, no longer Super Sam but merely Sam, facing down a freight train and wishing he wasn't so squishable. Something inside of him started shrieking in fear- as if several tons of steel could be stopped by screaming no, as if the universe would be _required _to save him if he said it loud enough- and his mind, no longer enshrouded by a protective gray haze, slipped free of the calculated hold of the programs.

His limbs jerked, pinwheeling wildly with the animalistic need to flee, his thoughts and the programs cascading downward into chaotic disarray together. It was too soon, too quick, too _stupid_, dying from thinking he was somehow faster than all the other people who jumped out in front of trains, dying because he had foolishly, worthlessly, tried to be a hero. Though he knew it lasted only a fraction of a second, it seemed to take an eternity for the train to close in on him, the sound of its earth-shattering roar slowly drowned out by the pathetic thumping of his own heart-

_(-'You're a soldier now!'-'I smell you, boy!'- 'I gotta get this to Optimus!'-)_

It was so small and pathetic and sticky- how could it hurt so much at the thought of never seeing Mikaela again, of seeing Bee again, without tearing itself apart? It swelled with pain even as it twisted in fear, fluttering, seeming to try to reach out through the empty space, grasping at something it couldn't touch, stretching one last time towards Mikaela, whispering _live _and _love you-_

_(-'I'm a one girl kinda guy'-'Did you hear me, Sam? I said I love you!'-)_

-and then turning to Bumblebee, the mere thought of the gentle alien impaling him on a spike of pain-

(-_the secret in the garage, the hidden yellow light waiting to welcome him, so gentle and warm and sad- peeling paint and dripping concrete, and still he wanted to stay_-'You're the one I care about most'-

_-the warrior, the protector, fierce and deadly and wickedly fast, yellow hands pulling apart armor, blue optics shuttered by the mask of the hornet-_- 'I would never, ever hurt you, Sam'-

-_limbs twitching with hurt, a glance of cool disdain_- 'I don't need a _human_-')

Sam reached for Bumblebee, wishing he hadn't been so god-awful stupid, wishing he hadn't tried to be a hero, wishing he didn't have to die while Bee probably hated him-

-and wordlessly cried out in surprise when something reached back.

His heart missed a beat, and his left foot slammed without warning into the dirt.

Caught off-angle, Sam pitched forward, good arm pinwheeling, the screaming from his shoulder nothing more than a post-it note pinned up in his mind. There was a thunderous mechanical snarl beside his ear, louder even than the sound of the approaching train, and something briefly snatched at the back of his stolen jacket before tearing away, taking a piece of the material with it.

The abrupt jerk stalled his momentum, but only slightly. Sam stumbled and found himself falling head-over-heels down the dirt mound on the other side of the tracks, screaming (he was ashamed to admit) like a girl as the ground rammed his shoulder back into place with an audible pop. Stars burst behind his eyes, and for a moment he was numb to all sensation as he watched dirt-sky-dirt-sky flash by overhead.

When at last he came to a stop, sprawled spread-eagle on his back on the dirt, Sam could only stare blankly up at the sky for several long moments. Watching the ominous clouds boiling over head, feeling something wet splatter against his forehead (was it raining already?), wishing distantly that his shoulder would stop hurting, it took a while for the ringing in his ears to subside. As feeling slowly returned to his fingers and toes, he realized he could feel the wild pounding of his heart rattling away in his chest, its rhythm so powerfully, furiously _alive _that it shook his entire body in time to its beat.

Another near-death experience to add to the list. But for once, he wasn't as happy as he should have been about the 'near' part; for once, the sound of his own heart beat wasn't a comforting thing. It was terrifying.

Because for one moment, for one infinitely tiny moment, he had felt the heart of another beside it in his chest- one that did not beat like a human heart, but rather pulsed with the cool mechanical life of an alien spark.

_Bumblebee._

Just beyond his toes he could see the freight train rumbling by, jumping and weaving erratically. He weakly flipped the bird at it just to keep up appearances, hoping to feel the flood of triumph he knew should have been racing down his spine. He didn't.

_Bumblebee_.

The pattering of the rain became louder and louder as the sky opened up. The cool water should have felt good running over his burning skin. It didn't.

_Bumblebee._

Thoughts, words, suspicions came together in his mind, falling easily into place like tumblers in a lock. Now he knew. Now he understood. And it hurt like being burned alive from the inside out.

"I think I'm gonna puke," he murmured, and promptly passed out.

...

**Recalibrating cerebral controls...**

**...Rebooting...**

...

_-Get up.-_

Sam's eyes snapped open. Air rushed into his lungs with a gasp so sudden it bordered on painful, as if it had been shoved down his throat.

What?

_-Get up. The train will not hold him long- _

Him? Who's him?

But almost as soon as the thought drifted through his mind, a sudden flood of memories broke through the dam of pain and wooziness. Wheeljack. _Wheeljack _was on the other side of that train, and would only be prevented from crossing to the other side of the tracks for a long as it was there. _Wheeljack _wanted to catch him, keep him from saving Mikaela-

_MIKAELA!_

Energy hotter than magma erupted from the deep well in his chest and scorched down his limbs with liquid fire. All traces of weariness evaporated before its heat, leaving him raw and burning with the need to_ find her_, find her _now _before the Decepticons could get to her, before the demons in metal skin could do worse than they'd already done. If those eyes no longer shone like silver, like steel swords, but were glazed with death or worse- if those lips as red as Mario's hat and fire hydrants and pomegranate's he'd never seen were torn and bloodied, peeled back into a ragged O that echoed with horrid screams-

Sam was on his feet before being conscious of even trying to stand, pushing himself forward into a sprint. Yet despite his sudden surge in purpose, his lopsided canter ended not three strides later as he slipped stupidly in the mud, going down hard on his hands and knees. The resurgent pain in his wrists and shoulder brought him back to his senses like a slap to the face. Thoughts other than those of Mikaela washed into his mind like the remnants of a forgotten dream, dousing the knee-jerk fire raging in his chest and reducing it to smoldering embers of frustration. And suddenly, inexplicably, he felt himself vomiting up a mirthless little laugh.

The whole world was going straight to hell in a hand basket under the Decepticon-lead armageddon. Bum- his best friend was off in Africa chasing an invisible wraith that might have been ripping the cables from his chest at that very moment. Megatron was on the prowl for his blood. Unknown legions of metal freaks had Mikaela in their clawed grasp.

There were alien programs of unknown purpose swarming around in his head, he had committed a felony by stealing a super-secret agent's gun, he had almost died because he just _had _to be all super cool and Mission Impossible to try to be a hero, his pained left arm was more pain than arm from the broken bone and re-located shoulder, and to top it all off he was in danger of being dragged back underground like the weak little human he was by the most physically pathetic of the Autobots, and all he could seem to do was slip around in the mud and wish his body didn't hurt so much.

Oh, and there was also the small matter of being able to feel Bumblebee's spark.

_-Get up-_

"Jesus, will you please just SHUT. _UP_!" Sam clenched his teeth shut around the roar, digging his fingers into the mud. "Five minutes, that's all I'm asking for. Just five minutes of peace without my world going fubar all over again. Is that too much to ask?"

At any other time he would have worried about the possible repercussions of holding a conversation with the voices inside his head. But given that he could somehow reach out and touch Bee's _soul_, it wasn't too farfetched that something else had decided to settle in and make itself at home in his mind...

...and he _really _didn't want to think about that.

_-In five minutes the engineer will have reached you-_

"I KNOW THAT!" He looked up at the sky, letting the rain strike his face and run down over his chin. "Come on God, seriously? _Seriously_? What did I do to deserve schizophrenic personality more annoying than a telemarketer?"

God declined to answer. He squeezed his eyes shut, lowering his head. _Why do the voices always have to have a point? _

_-All will become clear in time-_

Sam scoffed loudly.

"Yeah, like I haven't heard _that _bullshit before. You should be a Windex salesman, or star in one of those infomercials for acne cream." He paused, realizing he was rambling. Abruptly furious with himself, he let out an inarticulate snarl (_Mikaela hurt, Mikaela dying, why am I still standing here?) _and pushed himself to his feet, savagely beating back the gray fuzz that tried to sneak into the corners of his vision as the ground swirled dizzily.

Okay. Think, rationalize. Clamp down on the anger, the fear, and _think_.

_(...thinking easier than feeling, easier than recognizing the odd pulse for what it was, easier than acknowledging the pain it brought, a stake through the heart...oh, Bee...)_

Sam knew he could not outrun, overpower, or otherwise fight off any Cybertronian bigger than Frenzy (and even that had been a challenge). His only possible chance of success would be to outsmart them.

So, first things first: Thwart over-protective engineer.

Trying vainly to control the wild fluttering of his heart, the pounding in his ears, the whirlpool of panic sucking at the edges of his mind (_not possible, can't really be happening, box it up and concentrate on Mikaela_), he did the only thing he could do to put that plan into action- he started running.

Or, rather, loping. Despite the program's helpful nudges, his abused body didn't seem capable of sustaining much more than a lopsided canter, especially not as bruised and battered as it was. Squinting against the sheeting rain, feeling water begin to run down the inside of his clothes, Sam surveying the area before him. Not a hundred feet beyond the tracks there seemed to be some sort of construction sight, an empty (and, to all appearances, abandoned) construction site, complete with small hills of earth and vast pits, sprinkled with rusting yellow equipment that reminded him of exotic animals in some sort of larger-than-life diorama. Cataloguing the pyramids of metal pipes, the snaking coils of steel cable, the frozen mechanical mammoths, the outline of a plan began to form in his mind. Maybe, just maybe, the electrical field given off by the industrial materials would be enough to shield him from Wheeljack's scans long enough for him to find some kind of transportation.

Hey, it was worth a shot.

Sam made a beeline for the construction site, attention divided between making sure he didn't trip over something requiring a tetanus shot and tracking the progress of the train. Some cargo trains could be a mile long- it would take several minutes either for the train to clear the section of track where Sam had jumped, or for Wheeljack to drive his way around its tail end. But when looking for a way to avoid an alien engineer with scanners that could detect a single particle of pollen in the air, several minutes would disappear like chocolate samples in the tampon isle (if Mikaela was any indication of the female species' attitude towards the sweet substance).

Sam wanted to laugh at the mental metaphor. Maybe just giggle a little. But at the moment, anything involving Mikaela seemed prone to turn him into a magma-blooded, mud-slipping caveman who wanted to beat the shit out of whatever was attacking his girl, and the terrible knowledge that he probably was going to get the shit kicked out of _him _instead of the other way around, that he was not strong enough, brave enough, fast enough to destroy the monster that had come creeping out from under her bed- that sometimes, for all the love and determination in the world, there simply was no happy ending- effectively erased any seed of humor.

Balanced on the edge of some unknowable abyss that he dared not name or examine too closely, Sam jogged/limped/tripped as fast as he was able around dirt mounds and cement blocks, thinking only of avoiding Wheeljack.

(-_Just a little farther, just a little farther, find someplace to hide_-)

Throwing himself into a hole wouldn't work, especially since he probably wouldn't be able to get himself out. A hill of displaced dirt might have served as a physical shield, but it would do nothing to block powerful scanners. Squeezing himself into one of those metal pipes might have been ideal, but they were all too small for him to crawl into, even when his shoulder had been dislocated.

So he clambered over coils of ducting and skirted yawning pits, circling construction equipment and partially assembled steel columns, frantically plunging deeper into the industrial still-life. And still he could hear the train rumbling over the sound of the rain.

(-_Somewhere to hide, somewhere to hide_-)

He knew hiding wouldn't work for long, but he couldn't outrun Wheeljack, not even at the top of his game. The only option was to try to avoid him, to try to throw him off his tail, give himself just long enough to find a cab or a moped or, hell, to hotwire a dump truck and use it to mow down any unsuspecting Decepticon in his path. So no matter how desperately he wanted not to waste even one instant, Sam knew his only immediate option was to find someplace to lie low.

More pipes, giant cement cubes, a stack of I-beams, but not even so much as a trailer or at the very least a Caterpillar with an enclosed cab. No cars or motorcycles he could use to make an escape, either.

The sound of the train grew fainter.

(-_where, __**where**__, __**WHERE**__?-)_

A distant, familiar voice: "_Sam!"_

%$#*&!

Sam jerked his head around to glance behind him, but he couldn't make out the familiar white shape through the rain. Either way, it didn't matter. Wheeljack had bypassed the train. His time was up.

It was over.

_(No! I have to _save _her!)_

Rain pummeling the earth, splashing in the mud, relentlessly drumming- the click-hiss of moving Cybertronian parts, coming closer- pipes and dirt and tools staring back at him silently, offering no shelter, cruelly unable to either help or hinder- _life's a game, and sometimes you lose._

_(...I have to save her...)_

_'Do something!' _he screamed to the programs in his mind, ducking behind a bull dozer as Wheeljack came into view through the mist, transformed back into his bipedal shape, raptor feet sinking deeply into the mud.

And though he expected his demand to yield as much result as commanding a doorknob, the programs flared to life in his mind before he could even finish the thought, snatching control of his senses and briefly hijacking his brain. Symbols once again cascaded before his eyes as his alien-enhanced vision flickered over his surroundings, and while he couldn't read what they said, he somehow simply _understood_ the information he was receiving. Or some part of him did, anyway.

(-not me, never me, alien, _other_-)

After only a second or two, the programs turned his head towards a high dirt embankment off to the right, his vision doing that laser-scope thing again and zooming in on a large concrete drainage pipe recessed in the hill. Voiceless streams of data tickled the back of his mind, whispering that the five feet of soil combined with the layer of cement would serve to shield him from Wheeljack's scanners...and that the pipe had another exit in a car impound.

_YES!_

He could do this. He could _do _this! The programs tried to tell him something else about the tunnel, but Sam merely closed a mental door in their face, unwilling to waste even a fraction of a second more crouching in the mud like a wanted criminal while his wife might have been in danger.

"Sam!" Wheeljack called again, closer now.

Sam's heart lurched into a sprint, (_not now, not so close to victory_!) but he forced it to calm, to slow, by focusing on the robot's tone- rather than surprised and victorious, it sounded desperate, lost. The engineer didn't know where he was. Yet.

Scrambling out from behind the bull dozer on his hands and knees, Sam peered around into the empty space where he had last spotted Wheeljack, slowly pulling himself to his feet. He had to bite his tongue to keep from gasping as the engineer suddenly stalked out from behind a tilted pyramid of piping some three hundred feet away. So close. Too close.

**No sensor sweeps detected for current vector**, the programs were quick to reassure him. Sam breathed out a quiet sigh of relief; for the moment, at least, Wheeljack wasn't scanning in his direction.

Taking advantage of the robot's momentary blind spot, Sam sprinted as quietly as he could towards the large sewer pipe, trying to muffle his splashing steps, grunting softly as his abused body voiced its displeasure with the sudden exertion.

(_I made it through Mission City and Egypt and High School- this is a _cake walk _compared to that!)_

"Come on tough guy," he muttered to himself between pants, "Come on Matrix boy, where's your strength, huh? How's a pussy like you supposed to slag the evil robots trying to put your g-wife through the meat grinder if you can't outrun one measly little Autobot?"

So close, only fifty feet left, and then he'd be sheltered by almost ten feet of dirt and rock where Wheeljack's sensors couldn't find him. The engineer would give up eventually and go back to base, leaving him free to crawl through the pipe, steal a car from the impound, and go save Mikaela. He didn't turn around, didn't look behind him, because looking would mean that the engineer might be right behind him, might be able to stop him. His heart pounded in his ears; he blocked out the sound. Thinking about his heartbeat might lead him to think about the possibility of his heart (_his soul_) touching another, and thinking about _that_ would mean that what had happened over the tracks was real and not just a bad dream he could leave behind when day broke-

_(-'...infused with energy...'- '...an incomplete bond...'-)_

_No!_

_-What are you afraid of?-_

The question sounded rhetorical, like some of the high-and-mighty shit a harp-toting angel might be tempted to spew (just accept, and everything will be alright). It pissed him off. Ducking briefly behind a mound of dirt at the direction of the programs, Sam decided to answer, just to see if he could knock the disembodied voice off its pedestal.

"Well, let's see," he hissed softly, "I'm afraid of spiders, mimes, heights, deep water, Elvis impersonators, ham sandwiches, Decepticons, and Mikaela's dad, not necessarily in that order."

The voice was silent for a long moment.

Then, to his utter shock and mortification, it started to laugh.

"Dude! What the hell?

_-You are...refreshing-_

Sam rolled his eyes so hard he thought they might get stuck staring up into his skull, then darted out from his hiding place, dashing straight for the sewer pipe before Wheeljack had the chance to catch up with him. Or before he strangled himself just to shut the voice up.

But as he closed in on his destination, a feeling of giddiness growing within him the closer he came, the voice turned unexpectedly somber.

_-Your plan will not succeed-_

Five feet.

"Great! My disembodied voice is psychic now. What color boxers am I wearing?"

No answer. Though he didn't understand how he could perceive such a thing, he somehow knew that the voice was not merely declining to answer- it was gone. That chilled him, somehow.

But then the mouth of the pipe was before him, and the issue of the existence or non-existence of a second personality with a god complex shrunk to insignificance. Panting slightly, he sneaked a quick peek behind him just to be sure he wasn't about to be jerked out by the back of his sodden jacket. Despite his worst imagining, he could see nothing but the shimmering white curtain of rain. He was home free.

Stooping so that his head wouldn't scrape the top of the pipe, Sam hurried inside, momentarily startled by how loudly the sound his feet made sloshing through an inch of water echoed from the walls. It was dark inside the sewer- _really_ dark. But at least it didn't smell bad, so hopefully he wouldn't trip over something utterly disgusting as he shuffled his way through the pitch black. Keeping one hand stretched out in front of him and trailing another along the wall, he carefully plunged deeper into the musty tunnel, away from the faint light coming in from outside. Not far from the entrance, the hand stretched out in front of him brushed stone. A wall? Did the pipe turn?

Putting both hands to the obstruction and feeling outwards, he traced it back to the curving walls of the main tunnel on either side. That didn't make sense. The tunnel didn't turn, and a hand run across the stone above his head revealed that there was no escape pipe leading up to a manhole.

_(...please no...)_

Gritting his teeth, Sam forced down his pessimism and began to backtrack through the tunnel. There must have been a pipe branching off somewhere, that was it. There was _always _a way out, or so MacGyver said. This couldn't be it. This couldn't be the end.

Yet when he had run his hands over the stone walls from floor to ceiling, back and forth across both walls of the tunnel, the motions growing increasingly frantic, his short, wheezing breaths ringing around his head, he found himself beginning to wonder if it might be.

_(-No! You don't get to _**do** _this to me!-)_

The programs pinged at him gently, trying to get his attention, but he ruthlessly shoved them aside and began to retrace his steps, smoothing his hands sharply over the curving stone again. Something inside of him started to slip away, something vital, and he snatched it up and held it to him in a crushing grip, not knowing what it was but knowing that if he didn't hold on to it with all his might, if he let go...well, he didn't know exactly what would happen, but he didn't want to find out. So he continued searching.

_(Get out, find Mikaela. Get out, find Mikaela. Get out, find Mikaela.)_

"It has to be here!" He cried out frantically to the programs, "Show me where it is!"

Rather than pulling up a mental map and pointing him towards the exit, the scrawling alien symbols drew his attention to the slight weight in his right pocket. Dropping his hands from the stone, Sam began pawing frantically at the wet jacket, finally peeling open the indicated pocket and pulling out something metallic and rectangular. What?

**Portable combustion device**

_A lighter!_

Sam grinned from ear to ear.

"Wow, who knew Dave smoked? Not that I care, things like smoking are strictly personal-" he flipped open the top as he spoke, flicking the tiny flame to life, "-but talk about...irony..."

His voice trailed away as the wavering light illuminated the walls of the sewer pipe... and the concrete wall sealing off the end.

Sam wasn't aware of falling, but suddenly he was sitting in the water, back braced against the wall. The lighter fell from his numb fingers and sizzled out, plunging the tunnel back into darkness. Not that he needed to see, anyway.

What was the point of being able to see if there was no where to go?

Now, at least, he knew what the programs had been trying to tell him all along.

The voice had been right after all.

...

Reality, Sam had noticed over the years, had a bad habit of intruding at the worst possible moment. It was like a big fat sweaty dude getting on a plane and squeezing himself in between two hot chicks trying to have an impromptu makeout session. Or like finding a hair in the chili on your chili hot dog. You don't want or need it there, but it comes and puts itself in the middle of everything anyway, completely ruining the moment (or your hot dog).

And as annoying as it was, reality seemed to harbor a particular love of tormenting Sam, wrecking his plans, spoiling is moods, killing his friends, that sort of thing. It first came to him in the form of several multi-colored cars and trucks parking themselves on his back lawn. Transformers in general- and the Autobots in particular- had seemed like no more than figments of one of his more imaginative dreams up until that point. Sure, he had been awed and terrified and excited, but it had been as if he were living in a daze, merely going through the motions like a character in a book. But when his father's safe, normal, immaculately groomed yard- the stand in for the two hot chicks- was suddenly intersected by the presence of twenty-foot-plus sentient machines from another planet _that could turn into cars_, the haze lifted, the veil was rent in two, and suddenly the two hot chicks had to deal with the fat sweaty guy putting his blubber all over them. The trumpets sounded, the gate was lifted, the world came crashing down around his ears, sending him crashing back into his own skin, and all he could think was _'this is SO not good'._

There was also the time when Optimus died. That time, reality didn't just come sashaying down the isle- it dropped in like an atom bomb. Luckily he had been able to block it out with denial and the determination that he would bring Optimus back to life soon enough; otherwise, the pain of it might have destroyed him.

That was the other thing about reality- it sucked. Like, _a lot_. It smashed through preconceptions and ground confidence into little pieces. It drowned hope in a bucket of water and chucked joy off a cliff. In small doses, it induced paralysis, incoherency, nervousness, and awkwardness; large does could cause those being rudely introduced to it to choke in the middle of doing something important.

The problem with reality is that it forced people to think, and thinking was, in some cases, a very bad thing. Especially when jumping out in front of trains, when not losing your nerve is key.

Or when your girl is in danger...and you realize that there is nothing you can do about it.

Listening to thunder grumbling over the sound of the rain, Sam let himself slide down the wall, slipping deeper into the water. He blinked slowly in the darkness, numbly taking in the way the light from outside cast a gossamer silver sheen over his soaked sneakers and the faint ripples in the water. In the wake of the revelation that he could not escape through the sewer, every last ounce of energy had left him- the cold shower of reality effectively doused the wildfire raging through his veins, leaving not so much as a smoldering ember behind.

It was over. Done. Finished. The End. His last and best hope had been snatched away from him. Now it was only a matter of time until Wheeljack found him, and once he did the engineer would summarily drag him back to base and lock him in a room somewhere. Then he would scream and cry and beat on the walls, calling them every foul thing he could think of to make them hate him, make them not care about keeping him safe so much, but in the end they wouldn't let him out even if they despised him- they were too superior and noble for that- while the Decepticons tore Mikeala limb from limb. Then, when they finally let him out, they would say how sorry they were and try to cheer him up, but none of it would make any difference because Mikaela was dead dead dead and he would be all alone and Bumblebee would still hate him, no matter how many times he apologized, because it wasn't something he said, it had never been something he said-

Sam broke the thought in half, unwilling and unable to touch it or feel the shape of it. It was too raw, too painful. How stupid he had been, thinking that the scout hated him _just _because he spilled a big secret. No, that was only the straw that broke the camel's back.

He drug his fingers through the water, watching the ripples they made. Bee, Mikaela. Mikaela, Bee. He had screwed up with both of them. Even IF the tunnel had been open- even if he had figured out how to hot-wire a car on the fly and find directions to the hospital- then what? Demand that the Decepticons release Mikaela? Turn himself over to them and hope that they would let her go? Sam almost snorted at that. They probably would have skinned her just for fun, then made a lamp shade or something from her skin while he watched.

No, he would have had to take Mikaela and fled. He would have had to fight them. He could even imagine how the battle would go: Sam confronts Decepticons wielding large stick. Decepticon takes large stick, breaks it. Decepticon laughs. Decepticon steps on Sam. Sam 0, Evil Aliens 1.

But even knowing the odds, he would have gone anyway. It may have been a pointless effort, but he would have gone and faced down the Decepticons. He would have stood in front of them, held his arms out wide, and said, 'do it to me instead'. Because there would be no other choice, no other option- anything but see that knife plunge down into her chest. He would have guided it to his own heart instead.

"Maybe it's better this way," he murmured brokenly, "This whole thing was bound to get screwed up sooner or later-maybe...maybe it's better that it happened now. Maybe they'll leave her alone if I don't show up..."

_"Unfortunately, many of the Decepticons are far too sadistic for that." _

Sam opened his eyes and looked towards the mouth of the tunnel. Before he had discovered that the tunnel had been closed off, the sound of Wheeljack's voice would have caused him to jump out of his skin. Now, feeling strangely calm (_numb_) he merely turned his head towards the voice. He spotted the engineer just outside the entrance to drainage pipe. Rather than reaching into the tunnel to try to grab him, or even planting himself in front of it to block any chance of escape, Wheeljack sat with his back to the dirt embankment, leaving only his left arm and part of his back visible, head twisted around to focus his many optics on the human crouching within. If Sam didn't know better, he would say that his position meant that he was waiting for him to come out, or that he wanted to talk to him.

Wheeljack's head tilted to the side like a curious dog, head fins suddenly swirling with yellow.

"Do you realize that your current position is likely to leave your clothes saturated with water?"

...but then again, this was _Wheeljack_. Maybe he _did _just want to talk.

Despite the sullen mood, Sam felt himself give the mud-splattered robot a tiny smile.

"I'm already soaked as it is, dude. I'm not going to get any wetter."

The engineer visibly brightened.

"In that case, feel free to carry on. I detect no traces of human or animal waste in this water, so it is highly unlikely that you will contract any diseases from it."

Sam pulled a face, feeling a fierce sort of tenderness well in his chest. But the sensation reminded him of Mikaela and how he felt when she held his hand or shared an ice cream cone with him, and his smile died again. He blinked rapidly, telling himself that the line of moisture running down the side of his nose was just rain water dripping down from his hair.

"Ew. I totally did not need to hear you say that," he replied, working to keep his tone light.

"It is always beneficial to be informed, Sam." Wheeljack lifted a lecturing finger as he spoke. The simple gesture made Sam's gut twist up in knots, knowing that, at the moment, the gentle robot was forced to be his adversary. Kind, gentle, yet unyielding in his determination to cart him off to safety, dragging him away from where he most needed to be.

"...Yeah." His voice cracked on the single word, and he turned his head away, discreetly wiping the side of his face with his equally wet sleeve. When he turned back, Wheeljack's head fins had dissolved into a solemn blue. Time to get down to business.

Fully prepared to be as stubborn as possible and throw as big of a tantrum as need be when the engineer tried to take him back to base (-_traitor_!-) he was caught off guard when the engineer made no move to reach in and pull him out, or else demand that he emerge. Quite the opposite, in fact. Wheeljack seemed to pull in on himself for a moment, head smoothly turning away to look out at the rain.

"I wonder if Longshot ever experienced a moment like this," he murmured contemplatively, almost to himself. Sam blinked at the non sequitor.

"Who?" He asked, bewildered.

Wheeljack took his time answering, continuing to stare at something far away for a moment before glancing back over his shoulder.

"Oh, just a friend of mine, from Cybertron," he said lightly, though Sam could sense a sorrowful undercurrent to the words. "He was a lot like you, actually."

Sam tried to cover his bewilderment (why was he talking about his old friends when minutes ago he had taken off like a bat out of hell?), tentatively hoping that maybe, just maybe, if he could keep Wheeljack talking…. "So, uh...what happened to him?"

Some green crept into the softly fluttering fins.

"Oh, he joined the Decepticons."

Sam choked on his own spit.

"I-me-you think-he-"

Wheeljack shuttered his optics rapidly in a way Sam had come to associate with laughter, splotches of yellow spilling into the green.

"Not to worry, Sam. I harbor no suspicions that you will be joining up with the Decepticons any time soon." His voice turned more serious, all traces of yellow fading. "Although it would serve us all well to remember that even Decepticons have sparks, and not all sparks are inherently evil or distorted. That is both their greatest weakness...and their greatest strength."

That made a little bit of sense. Kinda. "Yeah. It would be hard to try to take over the universe if none of them were sane enough to come up with a plan that might actually work." _Keep agreeing with him. Get him to relax and let his guard down._

Wheeljack titled his head, mandibles clicking softly, unblinking optics staring at him and through him, zooming restlessly in and out.

"And," the alien added lowly, "it is much easier to justify the taking of power if one truly believes that they are doing the right thing for the people."

Sam started, then stared.

"No way," he scoffed, "they're, like, _insane_. And evil. And insanely evil."

Blue changed to green and green into yellow fast enough to give him whiplash, and though Sam couldn't track any change in the Autobot's expression (since he didn't even have a face to begin with) he could have sworn that Wheeljack was looking at him fondly, almost but not quite vibrating, like he had just found the absolute best thing ever and was so excited he didn't know what to do with himself. It made him feel sick with shame.

"I've lost count of how many times I've wanted to be able to say something similar to that. Although perhaps with more words..." he trailed off, ruminating quietly.

"Then why don't you?" Sam found himself encouraging, unconsciously scooting closer to the robot. _Stop it! Don't get drawn in to the conversation! He's just trying to lure you out!_

(-white limbs small and lithe, almost the size of a human's—why hasn't he reached in?-)

Wheeljack visibly sagged at his words, head fins darkening once more. He glanced away from Sam, saying nothing.

"...Wheeljack?" Sam called hesitantly after a long and tense silence. The robotic frame tensed, as if the engineer had had to recall himself from far away. Slowly he turned back to the human.

"How old do you think I am, Sam?" Wheeljack asked suddenly.

"Um, uh..." Sam reeled, trying to think of a coherent answer. _That _had come from way out in left field. What was Wheeljack getting at? _Play along._ "Uh, well, Bee's about a thousand years old, and you seem a little older than him, so maybe...two thousand?"

Wheeljack shuttered his optics. "I am 12,543 earth years old, Sam."

There was only one acceptable response to that. "You're really _old_! Geeze, I thought only geezers like Optimus and Ironhide and Rachet were that old!"

The robotic head nodded in assent. "The four of us are the only ones among the Autobots on Earth who were active during the Golden Age, before the time of the great betrayal."

"That's when Megadork took over, isn't it?" Against his will, Sam found himself intensely interested. Bee, his main source of info on all things alien, hadn't been around long enough to see much of Cybertron, and he never really had the chance (or the nerve) to chat up one of the old crowd about their good old days.

"Yes, it was. In any case, I was active as an engineer in the science academy during the golden age. Although I was not a very sophisticated model, my work nonetheless caught the attention of the science council, who were astonished that a lowly wiring droid was capable of connecting Nodes that even they, the privileged few of the Alpha class, could not."

...nodes? Alpha class? "...huh?"

_(-Focus! This about Mikaela!-)_

"Oh, pardon me. I keep forgetting that you have not been versed on Cybertronian society. How to explain..." His fingers clicked together restlessly, deep, pensive blue migrating into violet. "I suppose a rough approximation would be to compare it to the caste system used in India. I was one of the lower castes- not an untouchable, the lowest, which would have made me no better than a mindness cleaning droid- but still low enough that not much was expected of me but to keep my head down. What you must understand, Sam, is that unlike with humans, where a person of any intellect level can be born into any level of society, our castes do not define us- _we _define our castes. I was one of the rare few whose spark overcame the limits of circuitry and enabled me to do what the others of my caste literally _could not_ do: think abstractly."

"And you...connected...nodes?" Sam felt as though he had been hypnotized, the combination of the steady drumming of the rain and the humming blue light from Wheeljack's optics drawing him into the story, ensnaring his mind.

"I filled in the gaps of learning-" _(God, even his voice is distracting! What the hell_?) "-The way discovering the number two would connect one and three."

Sam struggled with himself, trying to work up the energy to be furious with Wheeljack the way he knew he should be, but in the end he only said, "Sweet."

Wheeljack paused as if translating the word, optics telescoping restlessly in and out.

"In any case," Wheeljack started again, after a beat, "I 'made waves' at the academy and attracted rather a lot of attention. Not all of it the positive kind."

Sam felt his gut clenching in fearful anticipation. "They were jealous? They tried to kick you out?"

"Primus, yes! But they did not succeed. I was too clever for that- como un zorro!" And he shuttered one optic in a wink.

Sam couldn't help but chortle slightly at the sight of the ridiculous looking robot, covered in mud and dripping water, comparing himself to a fox. But then he caught himself, remembering that he was still trapped, that Mikaela was still in danger. He shouldn't have been laughing.

Wheeljack, sensing the change in the mood, straightened himself once again, jovial green fading back into blue.

"In the end, it might have been better if they had. You see, I very quickly caught the eye of Starcream, then one of the members of the science council, and through him Megatron."

Sam felt as though he had been dosed in a bucket of cold water.

"Did they...try to kill you?"

Wheeljack hesitated. "Not at first. I was too valuable. They wanted me to join their cause."

Sam gagged, disgusted by the thought of either of them coming anywhere near Wheeljack, and even more frightened by the mental image of Wheeljack as a Decepticon. Would he have been black instead of white? Would he have been covered with armor and toting knives and guns? Would he have still been _Wheeljack_? That was perhaps the most disturbing question of all- not the thought that Wheeljack would have become someone else, but that he would have stayed _Wheeljack_, maybe quieter, maybe harsher, but still _Wheeljack_...while being a Decepticon.

The day was hardly cold, but Sam suddenly felt chilled.

"You said no, obviously...didn't you?" He suddenly wasn't so sure.

"Of course. I could see what they were doing, and I wanted no part of it. But...as you know, of course, they do not like to hear 'no' as an answer."

"Did you go to Optimus for help?"

Wheeljack stared at him curiously.

"You truly do not know much of anything about our history, do you? Sam, Optimus did not appear until _after _the great betrayal. The Autobots would not exist for several centuries. Starscream was the de-fact head of the science council, and Megatron was the High Protector, charged with guarding the Allspark. There was, quite literally, no one to turn to. My only stroke of luck was that the Decepticons were not yet ready to reveal their intentions just to acquire me. They wanted to keep things quiet."

"Why? They're hardly quiet now!"

"Consider this, Sam," Wheeljack urged, "If the US military tried right now, this instant, to stage a coup, oust the president, and instill marshal rule, would the civilians just sit by and let it happen?"

"No way," Sam instantly scoffed, "because that would be _completely _un-democratic and I can think of so many people who hate nazis. My mom's one of them. She's scary, trust me. No soldier would want to mess with her when she's wielding a golf club." Strangely, talking about his mom did not make him depressed like he thought it would, especially not when Wheeljack's optics shuttered rapidly with laughter.

"Then you understand what I mean. The Decepticons- our version of the armed forces- had to take control slowly, subtly, so that when the time came for the turn over it would seem like a natural progression of events rather than a hostile attack. In any case, the Autobots- the rebel resistance fighters- did not come about until Optimus Prime, hailed as the Lost Prime returned, entered the scene."

Sam briefly considered telling wheeljack about Optimus using the name Orion Pax, but a strange gut feeling made him decide against it. He had a feeling it would end up being very important soon.

"In any case, they decided that the best way to recruit me would be to recruit my friend and pontential bond partner, Longshot."

_(-'...each give their spark energy to the other...'- '...an unbreakable bond...'- __**an unbreakable bond**__-)_

_-Two become as one-_

_(Bumblebee, my friend, my brother, my bon-)_

_No!_

_-Don't be afraid-_

"Sam?"

Wheeljack's voice broke through his frantic thoughts. Sam's fingers curled up into claws under the water, digging at the cement. _Focus_.

"Nothing." He sighed. "It's nothing." He didn't need to look up to feel the robot's gaze resting heavily upon him.

After a long, tense silence, Wheeljack asked, "Have you ever wondered why I wear a mask, Sam?"

_That _caused his head to snap up, his eyes scrutinizing the engineer's face.

"I...I didn't realize you wore one."  
"Oh yes, this is not actually a part of my face," he replied lightly, reaching up a hand to tap one of his long fingers against the tiered metal plates covering the lower half of his head. "It's quite difficult to work an artificial... _prosthesis _into a transformation, which is one of the myriad reasons why our kind do not wear any sort of personal adornment...well, not any more, at any rate. Optimus Prime's and Bumblebee's are part of their physical make-up. Mine is...a necessary addition."

Sam's throat suddenly went dry. He swallowed. "What happened?"

But Wheeljack seemed determined to follow his own fluid narrative path, and refused to answer.

"Longshot was not a scientist or an engineer, but he worked closely with the academy. I guess you could say that he was the hired muscle, paid to test our new armors and shoot our new guns (we were ordered to invent more and more of those as the years went by- if only we had known the juggernaut we were creating them for!). To make a long story short, he accepted that a lowly class B droid could, on occasion, have a few good ideas, and I accepted that a bot built for war and defense could appreciate the finer points of architecture. We were...the best of friends. But being a part of the Defense Corp as he was, he was naturally a target of the Decepticons, even more so because of his connection to me."

Sam shivered and clandestinely rubbed the goose bumps that appeared on his arms as Wheeljack spoke. Something about the robot's tone chilled him—maybe it was the somber, almost lifeless way he spoke, or the way the normally engaging engineer sat with his head bowed, gazing out at something Sam could not see. Staring at the angular back, watching the light play over the sharp metal edges as falling torrents of rain made little clear streams through the mud covering his armor, he could almost imagine that Wheeljack was nothing more than a modern art statue, shaped in a pose that radiated regret and left out in the rain by the sewer, as if its subject somehow deserved to be left in such a place. But then metal shifted, parts gliding smoothly around each other with only the faintest of whirs, and the illusion was broken. Somehow, the resigned despair he sensed from the engineer only worsened when he was a living being with thoughts and emotions and the capacity to be hurt rather than a lifeless statue.

"But even once Longshot had accepted the Decepticon insignia," Wheeljack continued after an ominous pause, "I still refused to lend my services to their cause, regardless of the incentives they promised me. At one point, Starscream even offered to give me my own lab, to run as I saw fit. And when I say 'lab', I mean something more like a scientific compound rather than a single room. Such a thing would have given me opportunities I might never have had on my own as a lowly class B droid. It pains me to admit that I was…tempted. For a time. But I saw the weapons of destruction Starscream forced those in other labs under his command to make—mankind has never created weapons so terrible, I don't think—and I knew that I couldn't do it. I could not stand the thought of inventing things that could (and most likely _would_) visit such horror upon another living creature."

Sam tried to crack a reassuring smile, but he couldn't seem to remember how to make his face move that way. He sensed that something was coming, some revelation that was devastating enough to crush even the bubbly engineer beneath its weight.

"But that means brownie points for you, right? Cause I can think of _so_ many people who wouldn't have the guts—or gears, gears work too—to stand up to Starscream the way you did."

But rather than react positively, Wheeljack merely curled in on himself even further, as if trying to hide.

"Bravery did not motivate my refusal, Sam. At the time, I was far too naïve to worry about my own safety. I thought myself too important to do away with. No, the problem was not in _living_, but in living with _myself_. I would have become nothing more than a shell under the burden of guilt building such weapons would have brought." Unexpectedly, he made a sudden slashing motion with his hand, as though tearing himself from his train of thought. "The point is that I refused. I refused again and again, and despite the urgings of my friends, including Longshot, I was too vain to leave Iacon and simply disappear. And in the end, my confidence in my abilities—and in the general benevolence of Cybertronians other than Starscream—resulted in my downfall."

His voice grew quiet, distant, his hands slowly migrating purposefully up towards his face as he spoke. "One day, a group of scientists working in one of Starscream's labs finally tired of having their offers rejected by a lowly droid with a lucky spark." His voice dropped again, becoming little more than a whisper of sound. "They planned to kidnap me. Longshot knew."

Spidery fingers clinked against the metal of Wheeljack's mask, deftly working at the places it connected on either side of his head. Lightning flashed soundlessly, causing Wheeljack's shadow to stretch out against the curving wall inside the tunnel, dark and tortured and wraith-like. Sam felt as if he suddenly couldn't breathe.

"They dragged me down into the bowls of the academy building, deep down where no one would be able to hear me. Longshot followed."

There was a gentle, apologetic click, and Wheeljack removed the mask from around the lower part of his face, keeping his back to Sam as he gazed down at the metal shell. Sam's heart began to beat frantically, his eyes fixed intently on the back of the engineer's head, noting with some shock that his characteristic fins seemed to have shut down, no longer fluttering softly back and forth, yellow and green and blue replaced by a flat, featureless gray. He dreaded discovering what lay hidden behind the mask, yet burned with a perverse curiosity at the same time. A small part of him somehow already knew what he would find.

"They bound me to one of the tables used to examine deactivated shells, and told me what happened to those who crossed the Decepticons." He slowly rotated the mask in his hands, and for a moment, when the light gleamed on the edges of the plates, Sam could have sworn it was made of knives. "I won't go into details of course—far too gruesome!" he added lightly, "But suffice it to say that their threats were dire enough to send me broadcasting for help on every channel. Unfortunately, my attackers were clever enough not to choose a location from which long range signals could be transmitted. At the time, I thought I was alone."

Sam connected the dots. "…Longshot. Longshot was there." A feeling of dread grew in his chest at Wheeljack's silence. "He….didn't save you, did he?"

A pause, long and painful, like squeezing a piece of broken glass. "….no."

Sam's stomach shriveled in horror even as he felt himself growing angry on Wheeljack's behalf.

"What a douche-bag!" He swore, "Well you know what, you don't need jerks like him anyway. Leaving you like that was completely un-cool and—"

"Sam," Wheeljack interrupted gently, "Let me speak. There is something I need to say, and I don't know if I will have the strength to say it again."

Sam let the rest of his words die on his tongue.

The engineer hesitated briefly, as if bracing himself. " I meant what I said when I told you that you and Longshot were alike. Imagine, for a moment, if you were Longshot," he urged, keeping his back to Sam. "You have just found out that there is a plot in place against your brother, your best friend—"

_(-invisible claws ripping, tearing—Bee, no!-)_

"—your soul mate—"

_(-Mikaela, oh god, Mikaela—get up, move, run!—Need to save, need to protect, but the tunnel was blocked and the sky was falling—__**mine**__, death cannot have her—metal demons standing sentry, cackling—all roads lead to hell-)_

**Survival odds less than .002%,** the programs affirmed. His heart, which had begun to race with resurgent fire, slowly filled with ice, beating rapidly, hollowly, like a dying rabbit's. He would do anything for her, _and it didn't matter_.

"You want to do anything you can to help," Wheeljack continued softly, as if sensing his thoughts, "…so you follow them—"

_(-engine roaring, headlights flashing along the stone walls—faster and faster, but never fast enough-)  
_"And when you find them, you are overcome with horror at what they are doing to the one you love—"

_(-'They'll use her to get to me!'—Stick her with needles, gouge out her eyes-)_

"You would do anything to stop them, even give up your own life."

Sam's fingers contracted, biting harshly into his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. He gritted his teeth, biting back hot tears.

"The love compelling you is so strong, you feel as though you will burst-"

Why why _why_ did Wheeljack have to keep talking? What purpose did tormenting him serve? He tried to force his limbs to stop shaking and his hands to unclench, but he felt as if that thing inside of him—so tiny yet so important, nebulous and just out of reach yet all he had- had started to slip through his grasp, and if he relaxed his grip for even a moment-

"Stop it," He whispered past unmoving lips.

Wheeljack turned his head slightly to the side—not enough to expose the area covered by his mask, but enough to watch the human over his shoulder.

"But then," the engineer continued insistently, "You realize that your way is blocked—"

_(-not a tunnel, not a path to freedom, just a dark hole, trapping him like an animal-)_

Sam fisted his hands in his hair.

"Knock it off already! I get it, you won!"

But Wheeljack didn't stop. No longer bubbly and quirky and off-beat, he plunged onward, possessed by memory and emotion (_purpose_), for once seeming every one of his twelve thousand years.

"Longshot was confronted by another group of Decepticons, Sam. They knew…what was taking place—" he turned his head away again, appearing unable to find the strength to look at his reluctant listener as he spoke, as though ashamed of his tale, "—and they knew of Longshot's connection to me. They told him…they told him to go about his business."

_(…'nothing you can do'….'return to base'…'nothing you can do'…nothing….__**nothing**__…)_

His face contorted and bunched together so hard it hurt, mouth opening and closing with screams and sobs that would not come, small little choking noises working their way up through his throat. God, it _hurt_!

"Don't you _**DARE **_tell me that I should do the same thing!" He snarled with so much force his voice cracked in the middle. "I _**hate**_ him for doing that to you, and I hate you for trying to make _me_ do the same thing! He should have done something—He should have found a way—"

Something touched the top of his head with infinite gentleness, then smoothed carefully down his temple and across his cheek. He looked up, startling slightly to see that Wheeljack had abandoned his post outside the entrance and leaned noiselessly into the tunnel, reaching out to gingerly stroke him with one long-fingered hand. The comparative brightness from outside cast the engineer in a featureless black shadow, hiding his face as effectively as a mask.

"Do not condemn him, Sam. He did what he thought would be of most benefit to me." A meaningful pause. "But I thank you for the sentiment." Somehow, Sam could not imagine any amount of words holding as much _feeling_, as much reverent thanks, as that single sentence.

Sam scrubbed his hands across his face, feeling his grip on that precious thing (-hope-) begin to relax with a small, noiseless sob of denial. Letting go hurt almost too much to bear, like a barbed dagger twisting inside his heart.

When Wheeljack spoke again, his voice was very small. "Longshot assumed—probably correctly—that trying to come to my rescue would have been at best futile and at worst a death sentence…for the both of us."

Sam put his head to his knees as Wheeljack slowly withdrew his hand.

"Later, after they tired of me, Longshot came back and begged for my forgiveness. Sam. Do you know what he told me when I asked why he had not helped me?"

Sam lifted his head, searching the shadowed darkness of Wheeljack's face. The soft blue light from his optics—calm, steady, gentle—blotted out all else. He knew what the engineer wanted him to say, what he had discovered for himself after doing something so foolish as jumping out in front of a train.

The words fought against him as he tried to lift them into his mouth, but after struggling against his own tongue for a moment or two he managed to vomit out, "B-being a hero… won't solve anything."

Wheeljack inclined his head.

"Not quite the phrasing he had used, but yes, that was the gist of it. He reasoned that needlessly throwing himself into the line of fire would not accomplish anything beyond his own death." His tone twisted, becoming hopeless rather than understanding. "And, as you probably know, no one wants to die."

Sam glanced up in confusion as Wheeljack began to back out of the tunnel. What was going on? What happened to grabbing him and dragging him back to NEST? This was not the way he had pictured the conversation ending, and strangely enough that fact made him feel as if a tiny seed of tremulous, irrepressible hope had implanted itself in his heart once more.

"Longshot did not believe anything could be accomplished acting on unfounded hopes. He did not believe that anything could be worse than dying."

Wheeljack stepped out into the sheeting rain as he spoke, voice weary yet filled with an unshakable certainty.

"But he was wrong."

A curtain of light fell over Wheeljack's face as he withdrew his head from the tunnel, and suddenly Sam could see exactly _why_ the engineer wore a mask, even obscured as the sight was by mud and pouring rain. Where on a human there should have been a mouth and nose, on Wheeljack there was nothing but…a hole. A grisly, distorted hole carved deeply into his head, more deeply than he would have thought possible, ugly and pock-marked, the way he imagined a human face would look if the bottom jaw were torn off and the wound allowed to rot, turning the flesh thoroughly zombie-like.

Though he knew it was rude, Sam could only stare, mouth agape, at the ruin of Wheeljack's head. He never would have thought that the mask would conceal such a dire wound.

"Ratchet can't fix that, can he?" he murmured lowly, unable to tear his eyes away, swallowing down the bile in his throat.

"No," Wheeljack acknowledged, and for a moment Sam freaked, wondering how he could talk without a mouth, until he remembered that the aliens' voices emerged from vocalizers in the tops of their chests, not from their faces. "They used an experimental type of acid on me, one which prevents healing in the surrounding cells. The initial test was so successful, they decided to weaponize it!" He added cheerily. Sam felt like he needed to puke.

Wheeljack retrieved his mask from where he had left it just inside the tunnel, flicked the water from it, and crouched down in his original position, keeping his back to Sam as he snapped it back into place around his head. His fins immediately lit up, returning the engineer's appearance to its usual vibrancy. Looking at him, Sam never would have guessed the secrets such an eccentric continence concealed. It was _creepy_.

"Why…why your face? What, did they have face fetishes, or something?" Sam tried to chuckle, but found there was really nothing funny about the post-it loving alien having a hole eaten in his head by acid.

"These—" Wheeljack indicated his head fins, "—are what I use to communicate with other droids. Originally I only had one…and, well, as you can see, they wanted to get rid of it. Perhaps they thought to isolate me from my own kind, although why they thought I went around chatting up cleaning bots on a regular basis I will never know." Wheeljack tilted his head to the side, regarding him warmly and a little shyly. "I was able to thwart them, however. Now I have _twice_ the number of light panels!"

Sam couldn't help the grin that spread from ear to ear, amazed and awed that the alien was trying to impress _him_, afraid (Sam could sense) that the human would be repulsed by the grisly remnants of his face. He was like a phoenix, he realized suddenly (even if the thought _was_ a little sappy)—he had arisen from the flames. Limping, awkward, a few feathers missing, but arisen none the less, trying with all the strength he had to smile.

"But you see," Wheeljack continued, lightness fading, "Every moment that I was captive, I prayed to Primus for someone to save me. I would even have rather died than continue on like that hour after hour as the acid did its work. What Longshot never understood—and what it took me a long time to come to terms with—was that what I needed was not patience and reasoning and logic. After all, the right thing to do is rarely ever reasonable or logical. No, I needed someone who wouldn't care what the reasonable, logical thing to do was. Pain is not logical. Suffering is not logical. ….Love is not logical."

A lump rose in Sam's throat, his chest constricting at the word 'love'. (_Mikaela_…)

Wheeljack rose to his feet, optics fixed on the human huddled in the concrete drainage pipe.

"Mikaela!" Sam choked, staggering to his feet. "The thing with Longshot and you, that's like me and Mikeala!" He took a step towards the robot, throwing his arms out imploringly. "You know how you needed someone to come save you? Well she needs me, and I can't just sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for her to die!" He broke off, panting, realizing he hadn't drawn a single breath during his speech. He gazed up at Wheeljack, so tall and strange and downright alien, standing sentry before the mouth of the tunnel, optics whirling mysteriously, mandibles clicking gently every so often.

Feeling emboldened by desperation, Sam took another step forward, and then another, until a never-ending shower of cool water began to strike his head as he ducked his upper body out of the tunnel to confront Wheeljack, one hand gripping the edge of the pipe until the bones felt like they would break.

"Let me do for her what no one did for you," he pleaded, in the most serious, adult voice he could muster. Given that his insides felt like they were trying to shake themselves apart, he felt that he did a pretty decent job. But when Wheeljack did not answer, only continuing to gaze down at him without comment, he heard his voice crack with the raw need lodged in his throat. "Please! I have to save her, especially since it's pretty much my fault that they're after her in the first place! It would totally ruin our honeymoon if she got eviscerated."

At long last, Wheeljack stirred, appearing to revive from some sort of trace.

"I know," he replied, tilting his head. And to Sam's shock, a mischievous orange burst through the dark blue glow emanating from his head fins. "And that is precisely why I'm going to help you."

Sam could only gape in shock at the robot, feeling as though the rug had once more been jerked out from underneath of him. The world tilted, dumping him out of bizarro land and back into the place where puppies were cute, boyfriends rescued girlfriends (wife! Wife! Gotta remember that, she'll be pissed if I don't), and alien engineers were _**frickin awesome**_!

But just to be sure he wasn't experiencing some kind of vivid hallucination in which luck finally turned his way (which it never did), he pointed a righteous finger at Wheeljack and said, "You. _You_. You're going to help me?" At the answering nod, the finger dropped. "Oh." He valiantly repressed the urge to scream and start running around in little circles of joy with his hands in the air, forcing himself to remain dignified. He may have had the promise of help, but Mikaela wasn't safe yet. A single wisp of thought brushing over the possibility of having to confront several Decepticons sobered him immediately. And he found himself having to ask, "You're going to _help_ me? _Why_?"

Orange faded to lime green, and after a pause Wheeljack held out a hand.

"Because this universe needs more heroes, Sam."

Sam took a shuffling step forward, finally drawing himself the rest of the way out of the pipe, and caught sight of the small hand gun being offered in Wheeljack's outstretched palm—the same gun he had used to shoot the engineer. He blanched, then felt himself turning a shade of deep red.

"Oh. Yeah. About that." He cleared his throat, reaching for the gun. "Sorry. We're still cool, right? Me and you, you and me, kicking decepticreep butt together?"

"Don't worry!" The engineer said brightly as Sam tucked the weapon into the holster beneath his jacket. "All of my friends shoot at me!"

Sam's eyes flashed up towards Wheeljack in alarm, but seeing the buttery yellow color tinting his head fins he guessed that the engineer had to be joking. At least a little. Now that the alien had divulged his big, dark secret, he did seem somehow more...buoyant. He even bounced a little in place. Just slightly. Okay, so Sam could understand how he might sometimes come across as annoying.

"Not that I'm trying to look a gift horse in the mouth, or anything," he said slowly, wondering if the engineer's moods were always so mercurial, "But why the sudden change? What happened to dragging me back by any means necessary?"

Yellow dimmed into sea green. "_You _happened, Sam. You threw yourself off a bridge and leapt out in front of a train, and you did it not with the hope of saving yourself, but because you wanted to save another." Wheeljack scrutinized him with deep, unfathomable optics. "I do not think you understand just how few people would be willing to do the same. Some part of me expected your fear to make you compliant, and the fact that it did not humbled me."

Sam looked away, grimacing, uncomfortable with the praise. He flinched at a touch on his arm, then relaxed again as Wheeljack curled his hand around his shoulder, long fingers stretching all the way across his back to graze the opposite arm. The robot lowered his head until they were face to face, human and alien, one covered with flesh and the other with metal, both muddy and dripping, both capable of living and loving and dying. Two beings, so different and yet so similar. The thought was both frightening and comforting.

"And like Mikaela," he said gently, "I also know what it is like to wish that someone would save you."

Wheeljack withdrew his hand from Sam's shoulder, straightening once more, voice gaining strength and purpose. "We don't have much time. First things first- I'll need your watch back."

Sam blinked at the odd request, turning his wrist over to expose said item. "My watch? Why?" He asked, even as he fumbled at the clasp.

Wheeljack nodded towards it brightly. "Optimus Prime requested that it be retrofitted with a small tracking device-

"Son of a _bitch_!"

"-and I will need to take it with me when we part ways in order to adequately fullfill my role as a distraction."

Sam's mental tirade ground to a screeching halt.

"Wait, what?" He protested, "You said you were going to help me!"

"And I am, in the only way I can." He reached forward and plucked the watch from Sam's suddenly nerveless fingers, clenching it in his fist. There was a brief glimmer of light, and when the robot's hand opened again the watch was gone. Not magic trick gone, where it was only tucked up a sleeve or under a cup, or even hologram gone, when the nano-whatsits dissolved- the watch was _gone _gone. No way.

Sam had to bite his tongue to keep from geeking out all over the engineer about his apparent mastery of the space-time continuum, holding his questions at bay only by clinging to the knowledge that he had a rescue to stage, and that any explanation from Wheeljack would likely have left them standing in the rain for _days_.

"The Decepticons will be able to track me," the engineer was saying when Sam finally scraped his jaw up off the ground, "And Bumblebee will, undoubtedly, be able to track your watch. Both groups will need to be lured away from you if you are to succeed."

But Sam had stopped listening after the word 'Bumblebee'.

_Bee_.

"Wait, what, _my _Bumblebee? Coming here?" He interrupted.

"Yes. He-"

"He, like, didn't end up mirage chow in Africa?"

"No. He-"

"And he's coming here. To find me," Sam clarified frantically.

Wheeljack didn't answer, merely maintaining his steady gaze.

"_Well_?"

Optics shuttered rapidly with laughter. "Sorry. It seemed prudent to make sure you were finished talking, first. -and to answer you question," he preempted when Sam opened his mouth again, "_Yes_, Bumblebee is coming here to find you. But it is imperative that he does _not_ find you, Sam. This may sound cruel, but from what I have seen I believe that he cares more for you than he does for Mikaela, if only a little bit-"

_(-'I don't need a human'-'I don't want you to come'-)_

_Yeah, right. Fat chance of that. _

"-and seeking him out to try to gain his aid would not be the wisest course of action given the circumstances."

Sam swallowed thickly, his own heart feeling oily and poisonous and _alien_ in his chest.

"Yeah, that's...not going to happen," he mumbled darkly to himself.

Wheeljack nodded. "As soon as we part, you're going to need to run, Sam. And I mean that literally. It probably will not take them long to realize that we've separated." He held out a long white finger, pointing over Sam's shoulder. "There's a convenience market only 2.3 miles in that direction. Mikaela should still be at the local hospital if they have not transferred her somewhere else- use the pay phone to call for a cab."

Sam shivered slightly, the enormity of what he was about to do finally beginning to sink in. Knowing that he had to hike to a find a payphone made him wish he hadn't left his blackberry on the table beside his bed, thinking he wouldn't need it while learning to shoot a gun.

"How?" He asked, spreading his arms. "I don't have any money!"

"Call collect," Wheeljack advised, "C-A-L-L-A-T-T."

Sam narrowed his eyes at the engineer. "You've been watching late night television, haven't you?"

"Yes," Wheeljack affirmed. Then, cautiously, "...is that bad?"

Sam couldn't help giggling at that. Just a little.

Then, before he lost his nerve, he took a deep breath and spun on his heel, ready to launch himself into an all-out arm-flailing, pratt-falling sprint. But a light touch on his back stalled him, turning him gently back around. Wheeljack pulled his hand away and clenched his fingers into a fist.

"This I've seen on morning, afternoon, evening, _and _late night television. I can only conclude that it must, therefore, be acceptable."

The engineer extended his newly formed fist towards him, and after a moment of bewilderment Sam smiled grimly and bumped his own fist against Wheeljack's (-_one last hand shake before heading off to the gallows_-)

"Excellent!" the alien crowed, reclaiming his hand. "We are now 'bros'"

The pure, uninhibited joy Wheeljack exuded was infectious- Sam's smile stretched into a fierce, determined grin. _(..everything's going to be all right...it has to be...)_

Apparently satisfied that all was now right with the world, the alien drew himself up to his full height and took a large step backwards. Glancing down at himself briefly, he shook his feet one at a time to sling off some of the mud sullying his pristine white armor, then leapt into the air, twisted, and came down as a motorcycle. A hologram driver flickered to life astride the seat, causing Sam to wince slightly- he could only hope no one noticed the way rain fell _through _the man in the black body suit rather than running across his back and shoulders.

Wheeljack's hologram waved at him, and a canned voice called out over the sound of the engine roaring to life, "Live long and prosper!"

Sam waved back weakly, legs suddenly going rubbery. It was very likely that he would never see the engineer again, either by getting killed himself or losing Wheeljack to the Decepticons hunting for _him_.

"You too," he whispered, then found himself adding, "You're wrong, by the way. You're not a coward." He blinked rapidly, trying to keep his eyes focused on the white form through the rain. Wheeljack was so _tiny _compared to Megatron and whatever thugs he had brought with him, and all he had to defend himself with was a sonic noise-maker thingy. When _(-if!-) _the Decepticons found him, it would not take them very long to tear him apart, no matter how bravely he fought. Just like Jazz. Just like Arcee. It would only take one blast, one crushing grip, and then it would be Wheeljack laid out in that sorry little underground garage, head fins gray and dark (-_what good is a smile against a gun?-). _

"You're not a coward," he said lowly, "You're very, very brave." _In more ways than one._

Wheeljack's engine revved in response, tires spinning in place, kicking up mud.

"We have approximately one hour and 37 minutes before Bumblebee arrives, Sam!" he chattered eagerly, as if excited by that fact, voice so bright and happy it practically _glowed_ (-_no one's ever told you that, have they?_-). "I suggest we commence prototype testing of the mate-recovery plan immediately!"

And with that, he spun in a tight little circle and zipped away, although not before Sam heard him singing-_singing_!-

_"Oooh I've got a metric ton of coconuts, di-da-li-di-!"_

Sam could only stare after him for a moment as he disappeared into the veil of falling rain, then slowly shook his head.

"I always get stuck with the lunatics," he muttered.

And with one last glance towards the place where is last and best ally had disappeared, Sam broke into a run.

...

The light coming from the windows of the 7-11 shone like a beacon in a storm-tossed sea.

As Sam struggled over the low chain-link fence and squished his way through the mostly empty parking lot, tortured breaths wheezing in his chest, legs muscles screaming and cramping from sprinting through the urban landscape like a man possessed, the sight of the 'Open' sign in the doorway seemed like a handwritten note from God assuring him entrance into heaven. If heaven had been adorned with unlighted neon cigarette signs, sprinkled with litter, and smelled of three-day-old bean burritos. And if heaven had somehow been transplanted smack-dab in the middle of Hell's watery cousin.

His eyes sagged closed with blissful relief as he slowed into a jog that rapidly morphed into a stumbling shuffle-step, never so grateful to see a run-down and hopelessly dirty convenience store. Staggering towards the glass door felt like coming home; here was air conditioning, here was a shelter from the rain, here was normalcy and, at long last, a way to call for help- the payphone.

(-the phone lay off the hook, connected to nothing but static- no one tells you the worst part is not knowing-)

_'Just a little longer, I promise.'_

As Sam all but fell into the door and leaned his weight against the metal bar to ease it open, his breath caught with the sudden, overwhelming desire to call his parents. The urge to hear their voices again, to run to them with the life-ending burdens crushing him into a pulp and hope that they could save him like they always did, to know that no matter how bad things got, no matter how insurmountable a problem seemed, everything would always turn out right in the end because his parents were there, because his mother was a demon with a baseball bat and his father always had his trusty golf club, was so strong he almost laid down right there in the doorway and cried.

But then the door was creaking open, the bell above it clanking noisily, the smell of sweat and ammonia and cooking oil washing over him as harsh fluorescent light stung his eyes and the soft strains of foreign tv show tickled his ears, and the swelling tide receded. This was not heaven, and home was not safe. Time to be a big boy, Sam. Time to open the closet door and face down the monsters.

_(-'You're a soldier now!-)_

He squeezed himself inside the 7-11 and leaned back against the door to close it behind him, shutting out the rain trying to thrust itself through the crack. Then, taking a deep breath in through his nose and puffing it out through his mouth, he pushed himself forward-

And froze in his tracks at the sound of a man pointedly clearing his throat.

Sam twitched so hard he nearly hurt himself (-chill, it's not a Decepticon, there are no Decepticons here-), head swiveling towards the sound. His eyes immediately found the source of the flemy disturbance; a pudgy, balding man, maybe around forty or fifty, stood behind the counter with his meaty arms crossed over his chest, a scowl hitched onto his face.

"Uh..." Sam said intelligently, holding out his hands to show that he didn't plan on robbing the guy or anything, "Yo no speaky Indian- Hindu! I mean Hindu. I'm from out of town, you know, on vacation..." he trailed off when the man's expression didn't change. Deciding to change tactics, he held up two fingers in a peace sign and said cheerfully, "I like cows too. We could be brothers. You and me, best friends forever, loving cows..."

He trailed off as the man's gaze slowly roved downward, glaring at his pants and shoes. Sam followed his gaze, looking down at himself.

"...you don't like my pants?" But then he noticed the puddle he was making, as well as the plastic fiber rug a few inches to his right, and it clicked. "Oh. Oh! Sorry."

And he stepped sideways onto the rug, making a big show of ringing the water from his hair and jacket and wiping off his shoes, maintaining what he hoped was a friendly rather than homicidal grin.

_(-Don't let them see what lies beneath the mask-)_

Luckily his actions seemed to appease the owner, and without a word or even an acknowledging grunt he seated himself in a groaning plastic folding chair and turned his attention back to the ancient TV (with bonus coat hanger antenna) propped on the counter. He thumbed up the volume, and proceeded to studiously ignore his only customer, humming loudly along with the show.

"Yep. Glad to meet you too," Sam mumbled under his breath (still not entirely certain that the clerk didn't speak perfect english and was simply letting him make a fool of himself). Then, newly rung out like a human-shaped sponge, he started towards the back of the store in a much less sodden fashion, shoes squeaking obnoxiously. It wasn't lost on him that there was a land line phone in plain view behind the counter, but he sensed that any attempt to request its use would be met with a stony silence, and he would rather face a dozen Decepticons then to be caught sneaking in a phone call behind the clerk's back. So, payphone it was.

For a moment, passing between the drink refrigerators and the candy shelves, Sam felt a flash of panic at the thought that, like in most places in America, the store's payphone had been traded in for scrap under the looming pressure of the cell phone age. But then he saw a long red metal box with a glass window hanging on the wall above the sink- one of those old fire boxes reading 'in case of emergency, break glass'- holding, of all things, a wooden handled ax, and the fear subsided. If this place was enough of a blast from the past to have something as awesome and useful and potentially child endangering as an ax, they were almost guaranteed to have a payphone.

And when not a moment later the candy row ended, he saw that he was right- in a small alcove in the very back of the store, hidden from view by the row of refrigerators on one side and a counter of Slurpy machines on the other, the blue and black payphone looked as though it had not been touched for a hundred years. His heart twinged with fear at the sight of the thick layer of dust coating the plastic, but as soon as he picked up the handset his fear was relieved by the clear, annoying buzz of a dial tone echoing from the speaker. Excellent. He was in business.

Thrilled and uplifted at his unbelievable luck (-_please don't screw me this time, god, I need something to go right for once_-), he wedged himself into the alcove, jamming the handset up against his ear. His hands shook so much from mingled anxiety and relief, anticipation and dread, that his fingers ended up mashing several buttons at once when he went to dial in the number, eliciting a painful bleep of protest from the speaker.

Sam paused, closing his eyes, trying to center himself like all those Yoga gurus advised. He tried thinking of forest clearings or blue lakes, but the visions somehow kept morphing into scenes from his nightmares- Mikaela being chased through the woods by a nameless Decepticon with blood red eyes, Mikaela being dragged down into the murky depths by a lithe mechanical body that glimmered briefly in the sun before plunging back down beneath the waves, disappearing into the blackness. And any attempt to concentrate on his breathing or heartbeat (-another heart, another soul, bound together like a spider caught in a web-) led him back to thoughts that he had firmly decided back in that tunnel to Not Think About until Mikaela was safe, so that was out.

So rather than trying to _not _think about Mikaela, he focused on her instead, using thoughts of her smiling, laughing, to feed the terrible snarling thing in his chest, letting its determination, its impassioned rage, clear his mind of all doubt and distraction. And it worked- sort of. At least enough to let him punch in some numbers he vaguely remembered from a commercial featuring Carrot top.

Then he waited, listening to the sound of static crackling on the other end of the line. Nothing. No prompt, no dial tone. Was he supposed to enter a phone number? He stabbed at pound with his thumb, hoping to get the operator. Still nothing.

_Breathe, don't panic. You're probably just doing it wrong. _

Wondering if maybe starting over would do the trick, like rebooting a computer, he pressed down on the hook to disconnect the call, waited a beat, and let it spring back up.

But to his utter confusion, the dial tone did not return.

Brows furrowing together, he pressed down the hook more forcefully, holding it to a count of ten before releasing. Still nothing. No dial tone, no recorded message, no annoying beeping, nothing. Nothing but static.

Yet something stopped him from slamming the phone back down in frustration. There was something..._wrong _about the empty hiss coming from the speaker, more wrong than simply a dropped connection or a busted phone. The longer he listened to it, pressing the hand set ever more intensely against his ear, straining to hear something, _anything_, the more he became convinced that someone on the other end was listening to _him_.

The feeling of wrongness grew, stealing his breath and slicking his palms with sweat. He felt transfixed, frozen, like a rabbit looking into the headlights of an oncoming semi and being mesmerized by the sight, feeling himself holding his breath in the hopes that whatever was listening on the other line wouldn't hear him. His heart began to race, knocking painfully against his ribs and shoving itself up into his throat, the tension pulling taught like a guitar string stretched beyond endurance, pulling tighter and tighter-

Sam jerked the handset away from his head, panting, every hair on his body standing on end. He stared at it wearily, no longer convinced of the innocence of blue plastic, then moved to hang it back up.

_"I wouldn't do that if I were you."_

Letting out a short, breathless cry of alarm, Sam dropped the phone, jumping backwards and slamming into the wall of the alcove. The cord caught the handset as it fell and set it swinging wildly back and forth, bouncing slightly around his knees. The speaker twisted towards him and away, towards him and away.

Sam covered the side of his face with his good hand, trying to get his heartbeat back under control. He couldn't afford to be carted to the hospital like Mikaela for a heart attack- even though they would be in the same place, the heart attack part would put him out of commission. He wouldn't be able to do anyone any good while lying in a medicated stupor.

Besides, he had probably just imagined the lilting, otherworldly voice emerging from the speaker. He was stressed, that was all- even Super Sam probably had mild nervous breakdowns on occasion. Yeah. That was it

_(-pretend the monsters aren't real and they'll go away-)_

Firmly determined not to let himself be afraid of a phone (much less an imaginary voice that could, at worst, do no more than shout at him, no matter how creepy said voice was), Sam slowly reached down to retrieve the dangling handset, then carefully lifted it back towards the hook.

_"The false Prime is in danger."_

This time, there was not a shadow of doubt in Sam's mind that the voice was real- no hallucination could have been so very convincing. _'Prime'_. The voice was an alien. A _Decepticon_.

Swallowing back the urge to fling the phone down again and run for the hills, he hesitantly brought it back to his ear, hoping that it wouldn't go all Steven King on him and bite off a chunk of cartilage.

"Who are you?" He demanded quietly, so as to not attract the attention of the clerk. When his words wobbled a little on the way out he wanted to kick himself. _Stop being afraid!_ "What do you want with me?"

How had they discovered where he was so quickly? Weren't they supposed to be tracking Wheeljack? His gut clenched suddenly at the thought that they had already gotten Wheeljack, and now, with their appetites whetted by the appetizer, had decided to move on to the main course.

_"I want you to save him."_

Sam did a double take. Wasn't the Decepticon supposed to be promising to let Mikaela go if he walked up the ramp into the slaughter house all on his own?  
"_Huh_?" He whispered, breathing shallowly, "'Save him'? Who's 'him'?"

_"The last hope of an Ancient; a life unwillingly reborn. The false Prime."_

Sam couldn't help but snort.

"Well you wanna know something, Decepticreep?" He glanced over his shoulder just to make sure the clerk wasn't approaching, "You're in for a real shock- the Fallen is dead. Kaput. Optimus wiped the floor with him in Egypt. How long have you been out of the loop, anyway?"

_"The Fallen was not a false Prime."_

Sam shakily blew out his breath.

"Look, I don't know what kind of master plan you're trying to drag me into here, but I don't want any part of it," he whispered heatedly, sounding far braver than he actually felt talking to the mysterious Decepticon. Like the empty static on the phone line, there was something indefinably _wrong _with the voice emanating from the speaker. He wanted nothing more than to hang up on the creep, but an invisible force rooted him in place, staying his hand. It was like talking to God- you just didn't hang up on God. Except unlike God, _this _voice made his skin crawl, tickling his ear with an icy breath that he would have found more appropriate coming from Satan.

_"You are already part of it."_

"Gee, thanks. Really appreciate it."

_"As is your mate."_

His hand contracted around the handset, cracking the ancient blue plastic.

"Why do you low-lives always have to pick on girls?" he snarled darkly, "What's the matter, don't have enough balls to come get me yourself?"

_"And your bonded."_

The three simple words caused his insides to vanish, filling him with ice, shorting out his anger beneath a deluge of fear, of denial _(-no no no- it's not true- it's not true-)._ And somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice whispered _'How does he know?'_

"That's not-" he choked. "-We're not-"

_"All of you will be needed, so I will give you a warning."_

Sam tried to marshal his thoughts, repeatedly kicking himself in the head with a mental foot to try to restart his brain, but his inner Yoga guru had tripped off the edge of a cliff the instant the Decepticon mentioned Bumblebee _(-Bee, I'm sorry, please don't go-)_ and without him Sam couldn't seem to find his footing. With his equilibrium gone, he clung to the only thing still keeping him anchored, using it to sharpen his determination, his focus.

"Where's Mikaela? What have you freaks done with her?"

But the Decepticon didn't seem to be listening.

_"Tell me something, Sam- why is the humming gone?"_

"What do you mean? What humming?"

He pulled the phone away from his ear angrily, leaning around the edge of the alcove to listen to the interior of the store, just to prove that the Decepticon was every bit as nuts as he sounded when his ears detected nothing out of place. But with his view of the front counter no longer blocked by a wall, he realized suddenly that the clerk was gone. The TV still blared out a nauseating spectacle of Ballywood at its best, but its audience of one had vanished. Thinking back, he realized that the creepy alien was right- the clerks' off-key humming _had _been following him through the store up until moments ago, when it suddenly cut out.

But the old guy was nowhere to be seen- maybe he had just gone for a bathroom break? Why was the lack of humming a warning?

Then, suddenly, a shape moved behind the counter.

A familiar tail of spiked silver vertebra rose up on the other side of the linoleum, its end, resembling nothing so much as a grappling hook, barbed like a thistle flower of knives. As he watched, the knives split apart, flipping around and sliding back together to form a single, wickedly sharp dagger thrusting from the end of the tail. The snake-like limb held the blade aloft, positioning it with the precision of a surgeon, and then thrust it back down past the lip of the counter, disappearing from view once more. There was the wet snick-thump of metal sinking into flesh, and then absolute silence. The tiny Ballywood actors danced on unaware, singing and smiling.

_"Try the third neck joint,"_ the Decepticon advised, voice tiny. The speaker clicked once, and then the dial tone started up again.

In the movies, the hero always sprung into action the moment he spotted danger, looking cool and calm and perfectly coifed as he snuck up around behind the bad guys hunting for him, beat them to a pulp with little to no effort, stripped them of their uniforms, stole their guns, and made a daring escape in the conveniently placed benz/yacht/helicopter. They were always in control, always had a plan, and no bad guy- no matter how devious his plots or elaborate his shark tanks or waxed his mustache- had the ability to scare them stiff. It was like violating a law of nature for the hero to be afraid in anything more than the most abstract sense.

But as Sam had come to find, real life was nothing like the movies. And he was nothing like 007 or Bruce Willis. So when he realized that a Decepticon had found him- when he realized that the demented hell-cat Ravage had somehow risen from the dead and had stalked him to a 7-11- and it became painfully, terrifyingly obvious when the voice hung up that he was alone in an enclosed space with a dead guy and nothing but a gun to protect himself, he did what no hero was supposed to do at the crucial moment; he froze.

Motor control deserted him; his limbs stiffened like fast-drying concrete. His eyes could only stare, unblinking, at the place the mechanical tail had disappeared, the invisible presence behind the counter glowing like a coal in his mind, sucking all the air from the room and leaving him leaning stupidly out into the open, lips slightly parted, phone still held to his head with the cord pulled taught. The gibbering remains of his coherent mind began mumbling every prayer he could think of, wishing with all his might that if he just held still the alien wouldn't know he was there and would leave again.

_(-Don't move, don't blink, don't _breathe_, it can't hurt you if it can't find you-) _

When a long moment passed without incident, only the dial tone at his ear and the voices from the TV breaking the painful stillness, Sam began to hope that maybe Ravage really had left. There was no movement anywhere in the store that he could see, no sound of claws clicking against tile, just the pattering of the rain and the chorus of Hindu voices, just buzzing lights and brightly colored candy bars. And despite the fact that he couldn't get the programs to respond to his requests for info (something that would normally be a welcome improvement to sharing headspace), he felt himself beginning to relax, breathing out softly and loosening his grip on the phone-

-and a lithe metal body suddenly leapt up onto the counter, crouching low as its head swung slowly from side to side. The single enormous optic recessed above the rows of chainsaw fangs took in the store with all the lifeless, deadly intent of a camera lens, like the kind used by serial killers watching their victims from a window. Searching. Waiting. Watching.

Sam clenched his jaw around an inarticulate cry, jerking himself back inside the alcove with such force that his head cracked painfully against the opposite wall. Only by hanging onto his common sense with his teeth did he stop himself sobbing out a litany of 'oh god, oh god, no, please, no, god!' and trying to tear his way through the wall to get away from Ravage. Speaking would make noise. _Moving _would make noise. His only stroke of luck so far was that Ravage did not yet seem to know exactly where he was, although he knew that couldn't last for long. He tried snatching at the programs again, frustrated and a little perturbed when he was met with nothing but silence, as if there _were_ no programs to begin with.

Forcing himself to breathe, to think through the panic that threatened to overwhelm him as he heard Ravage leap to the floor (and as he slowly realized that no invasive Cybertronian technology would be coming to his rescue), he wrenched his mind from the hole it had thrown itself into and forced it to plan.

Okay, priority number one: survive. That much was obvious. But though his instincts shouted at him to escape, he realized that running out the door or squeezing himself through a window would be a fatal mistake. Ravage was faster than him- a _lot _faster than him. At least inside the store there were obstacles in its path, but out in the parking lot the robot would easily be able to run him down and crush him with a single pounce. But Sam knew he would only be able to play 'dodge the feline alien' for so long before that too ended with him as a human meat snack, _especially_ since his super senses had conveniently abandoned him.

Suddenly hit by a flash of brilliance, Sam dialed in the number 108 as quickly and quietly as he could, prompted by a hazy memory of a page in a book listing the world-wide emergency phone numbers, since 911 tended not to work outside of America. If he could keep himself alive long enough for help to show up, maybe Ravage would decide he didn't want to tangle with a bunch of cops toting guns and take off. The demon cat might have been able to take on two or three people at a time, maybe even four, but lacking the deadly long-range fire power of the other Decepticons and boasting of a stature not much bigger than a flesh-and-blood mountain lion, a dozen armed humans just might be able to deter it. Hopefully.

But almost immediately, his brilliant plan turned into a nightmare when a voice began jabbering loudly on the other end of the line.

"Shit shit shit!" Sam hissed, fumbling and dropping the phone, a cold, fearful sweat breaking out on his skin when he realized just how loud the 108 operator was. Finally regaining his grip on the phone, he clamped his hand over the speaker to try to muffle the sound, furtively shushing it (as if the device would somehow register his alarm and shut up). But a trickle of noise stubbornly continued to leak out between his fingers, and not knowing what else to do Sam fumbled it back onto the hook, making even _more _noise in the process.

When silence descended once more, he strained his ears, listening, knowing that there was no way the alien hadn't heard the racket he'd just made. The fact that he couldn't hear claws ticking against linoleum was far from reassuring- Ravage only made noise while it wasn't actively stalking something. And although he couldn't see the robot, he knew it was close, too close, and that if he wanted to survive he needed to get out of the alcove _immediately_.

Ducking low so that his body was hidden from view by the shelves, he reached his right hand inside his jacket and carefully pulled the gun from its holster, holding it in a two-handed grip as he gingerly began to ease his way out of the alcove, looking up and down the aisle to make sure he wasn't about to be pounced upon.

_'Where is it?'_

To his right was a line of refrigerators, to the left was the slurpy counter. Lots of sugar, calories, and plastic wrappers (even a shelf of wine and beer bottles, if he wasn't mistaken) but no stalking metal aliens.

_'Come on, you big pussy. Where are you?'_

And to his surprise, the god-voice from before answered.

_-Look up-_

Without pausing to think about the ramifications of following the advice of a disembodied voice (who might or might not have been trying to get him killed by distracting him), Sam felt his head instinctually jerk upwards, eyes scanning the tops of the shelves, and he raised the gun to follow his line of sight as he craned his neck, combing the ceiling to the left and right-

A blur of silver exploded towards him from the top of the nearest refrigerator, maw opened wide onto hundreds of metal fangs. Sam yelped and tried to duck out of the way, blocking his head with his shoulder, remembering that he held a gun only a split second too late. Heavy metal paws collided with his upraised forearm with the force of a speeding truck, claws missing his eyes by scant centimeters. The gun went off in his hand, missing his attacker entirely and shattering something behind the feral cat. The force of impact sent him flying backwards, slamming him into the floor several feet away, rattling his teeth in his skull and causing black stars to burst before his eyes. Ravage, propelled by its own momentum, kept going even as he stopped, rolling away from him and skidding to its feet as lithely as any jungle cat.

And then, to Sam's shock, it merely waited for him to roll onto his stomach and push himself back to his feet, head tracking his slightest movement, tail thrashing lazily from side to side, metallic snarls dripping from between his teeth. Just like a real cat, Sam realized suddenly- it was playing with its food. Oh great, a creepy, sadistic, cat-shaped alien planned to torment him in his last moments _before _chewing his guts out-

But then he stopped, a stray thought pulling him up short. Ravage may have been stronger and faster and way sneakier than him, but if it really was as animalistic, as _simple _as it appeared, then maybe he would be able to out _think _it.

Shakily clambering to his feet, Sam redoubled his grip around the gun, aiming it right for Ravage's eye.

"Come on, kitty, you want to play?" The robot tensed, lowering itself into a crouch, metal claws digging deep furrows in the floor. "Here kitty kitty kitty-"

Something erupted upwards from between his feet, deeply scoring his hand and knocking the gun from his grip. Sam could only catch a brief glimpse of a tiny, stooped figure as thin as the blade of a knife- like stamped sheet metal given animation- before tiny, needle-like fingers were tearing into him, scrambling up his body, slicing into everything it could reach, and then all he could think of was Frenzy and _'get it off, get it off_!' and _'shit, that stupid cat is smarter than it looks'_.

Ravage lunged for him again, taking advantage of his distraction. Sam tried to duck beneath the leaping robot, but the master predator had obviously anticipated the move, swinging its tail down between its legs as if flew over top of him so that the heavy grappling hook thing on the end caught him in the stomach, sending him and the thin little freak flying backwards into the slurpy machines.

Red and orange slurpy spilled everywhere as he collided with the dispensers, tipping them over and ripping the cords from the light sockets, exposing sparking wires. Normally he would have tried to avoid rolling around in sticky puddles of partially iced fruit punch, but with the wind soundly knocked out of him and a mini me stick figure swarming beneath his clothes, jabbering loudly and trying to kill him with paper cuts, he wasn't too worried about getting messy.

Gasping air back into his straining lungs, trying to keep from having needles stuck through his eyes while keeping a look out for Ravage, he realized that he was going to lose very quickly fighting against two enemies at once. He needed to find a way to get rid of shorty, and fast.

His hands fumbled along the counter, looking for any sort of weapon he could use now that he'd lost his gun- a plastic knife, a beer bottle, even a piece of broken glass- but encountered nothing other than spilled slurpy, plastic cups, and thick electrical cords. The tiny robot scurried up along his chest, taking advantage of his momentary distraction, and started forward to attack his face with its razor blade fingers. Sam reached up with his hands before it could start carving and seized its thrashing limbs, pulling them away from his head, stubbornly retaining his grip even when the freak turned to assaulting his hands and wrists. He held the thrashing thing out at arm's length, turning his head to the side to keep its sharp fingers from getting at his eyes-

And spotted the ruin of the wall outlet exposed by the fallen slurpy machines, its guts pulled out and strewn along the counter, sparking dangerously.

Quickly glancing around for Ravage, he found the robotic feline turning to him again, stalking leisure towards the ruined slurpy counter. A plan began to form in his mind.

Sam waited, blocking out the pain in his hands as Razor Blade (as he had dubbed the tiny freak) continued to tear at him, shrieking indignantly, watching Ravage slowly creep closer, waiting until the alien lowered itself into a crouch and sprang forward.

Wrenching Razor blade to the side, he thrust the annoying robot towards the sparking outlet, remembering at the last moment that metal was an excellent conductor and letting go, leaving the robot to skid along the counter as he threw himself forward beneath the lunging predator sailing towards his head-

An almighty scream rent the air as Razor Blade and Ravage together collided with the wall and the shredded wires. Lethal arcs of electricity scurried over the thrashing pair, strobing over writhing metal with intermittent bursts of light that elicited mechanical howls of agony, like the shriek of rusted iron being torn in two.

Breathing heavily, Sam scrambled off the counter and backed away until his back met a shelf, eyes glued to Ravage as the feline robot began to extricate itself from the tangle of striped wires and the conducting pool of slurpy, its normally silken motions uncharacteristically erratic, white sparks jumping from its joints and flashing between its teeth. Wrenching his eyes away from the robot, knowing that if Ravage decided to come after him again he would have only moments, Sam began to hurriedly search for his gun, wanting to have something between him and those fangs besides air. His eyes scanned the floor, looking for the telltale gleam of burnished metal, but he could only find fallen Snickers bars and orange pools of melted slurpy. It must have slid beneath a shelf or one of the refrigerators.

Yet before the desperate, gibbering voice in his mind could convince him that it _would _be a good idea to get down on his hands and knees- thereby making himself vulnerable to attack- and begin peering under shelves and cabinets to locate his lost gun, a dry coughing sound drew his attention back to Ravage. The feline robot, still clearly alive despite his best efforts to melt its insides via electrocution, hunched over the crumpled, scorched body of Razor Blade, unhinging its jaw and moving in as if to swallow the smaller robot whole. And, to Sam's shock and disgust, it did...sort of. Razor blades' body, as if directed by remote control, began to fold up on itself like a Swiss army knife whose extended blades are suddenly retracted, reducing it from a multi-limbed little freak to a single shining blade. And then, most strangely of all, that single blade began to _bead_, like water droplets appearing on the outside of a glass, metal condensing into millions of tiny spheres that separated from the whole and were sucked up into Ravage's mouth as if by a vacuum. When the last tiny sphere had disappeared down the cat's throat, Ravage rehinged its jaw, shook slurpy from its body, and turned its single, glaring eye towards Sam.

_'This is SO not good.'_

Weaponless, exhausted, slicked with blood from dozens of tiny cuts all over his body, facing down a cat demon who had taken 10,000 volts and come out no worse for wear, Sam did the only thing any sane person could do- he turned around and hauled ass.

No longer taking its time and toying with him, Ravage darted after his retreating back like a bullet loosed from a gun, letting out a guttural roar. Shouting wordlessly, feeling fangs only inches from the back of his neck, Sam took a hard left and the end of the row, vaulted over another set of shelves in a move worthy of the Olympics, and took off back the way he came, trying to remember what all those animal planet shows had said about zig-zagging to avoid a predator. He heard Ravage skidding across the slick floor behind him, claw scrabbling at tile to find purchase, and estimated that he had gained himself, at most, a second of time by his quick turn. The alien may have been flexible and agile, but by virtue of its sheer size it carried much more inertia than Sam, making it harder for the robot to execute sudden turns, especially when the floor was slick with cherry coke and orange soda from the broken slurpy machines.

By the burning in his legs and the tightness in his chest, Sam knew he wouldn't be able to keep this up for long. He needed those cops to come bursting through the door before he became cat food, not after. What was taking so long?

Reaching out an arm as he ran, Sam snagged a bottle of wine from the top of one of the shelves as he passed, hefting it up over his good shoulder like a baseball bat. Once more reaching the end of the row, seeing Ravage begin to lunge to the side in obvious anticipation of catching him trying to make a quick turn (why did the rabid cats always have to be smart?), Sam decided to do something he knew the alien would never expect. He stopped in his tracks and twisted to face Ravage, swinging the bottle around his body as he moved, and smashed it as hard as he could into the alien's butt-ugly face.

The robot shrieked as the glass broke around its head, showering it in red wine. Sam jumped away, still clutching the broken neck of the bottle, carefully eyeing the alien as he backed towards the other end of the store. It pawed at its head, mewling, showing no sign of suddenly darting after him. And when it finally lifted its head, Sam could see why- somehow, the wine bottle had struck the Decepticon in the face with enough force to shatter its single optic. Wires and shards of glass spilled down its face as it restlessly shook its head, the amber glow that normally lit the optic flickering wildly.

When the robot began pawing at the ground, striding in a small circle as its jaw worked restlessly, seeming not to notice him standing six feet away, Sam felt his heart soar- he had blinded it!

_(-Score one for the good guys! Whoop!-)_

Knowing that he now had a chance of successfully eluding the robot out in the open, Sam decided to make his escape. Stepping as lightly as he could, never taking his eyes from Ravage (that robot was _way _more dangerous when he couldn't see it), he began to creep towards the door. Ravage, as if sensing his intentions, lifted its head and began to prowl through the store, twitching its muzzle from side to side as it went like a dog trying to trace his scent. Sam continued to back away from it, not even daring to breathe, watching as it stalked away from him and disappeared from view behind a shelf. Absolute stillness descended once more, broken only by the sound coming from the TV, which was now showing a black and white John Wayne movie. His heart beat faster as soon as Ravage left his line of sight, worried that the robot might try sneaking up behind him. It had sensors with enough data-collecting power to put MRI's to shame- even if it could not see him, there was nothing to prevent it from tracking the sound of his heartbeat or the smell of his blood. Why was it having trouble finding him? Was it trying to fool him into thinking it was helpless to trap him? His blood iced at the thought, and suddenly fearful that Ravage was lurking behind him at that very moment, Sam spun in a tight little circle, hands coming up to shield his face.

But he need not have bothered- the aisle behind him was empty. That was...odd.

Slowly, carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible (very difficult, given that his wet shoes had taken on the habit of squeaking very loudly whenever he stepped down wrong) he turned back around to continue sneaking towards the exit-

And banged into Ravage hard enough to rattle his jaw.

The feline robot sat facing him, as still as Megadeath's artistic reinterpretation of an ancient Egyptian statue, flickering optic glaring at him accusingly. Before he could jump away- before he could even scream- a heavy mechanical paw lashed out, catching him full in the chest, and crushed him to the floor beneath the robot.

Sam writhed against the linoleum as Ravage stood and began trying to touch the floor through his chest cavity. The pressure was unlike any pain he had ever felt before- the air was crushed from his lungs as Ravage slowly applied his weight, introducing Sam to the thoroughly terrifying sensation of being completely unable to breathe, no matter how hard his diaphragm spasmed. And then his ribs began to groan, and he could no longer remember his own name, kicking his legs out weakly and pulling at the Ravage's leg, trying with all his might to push up against the force threatening to flatten his heart and finding that his fingers only slipped away.

The alien's spiked tail slowly arched into view over its head, grappling hook tip reforming itself into the same dagger it had used to finish off the clerk, and suddenly Sam knew that he was about to die, but he couldn't even draw breath to scream-

A foreign voice called out from somewhere behind Ravage, shouting a command that rung with authority for all Sam could not understand the words, and a moment later the air split with the thunderous rapport of a gun going off. A bullet bounced off the back of the alien's head with an ear-splitting _crack _and a burst of blue sparks, and suddenly the dagger was unfolding itself, the pressure on his chest retreating as Ravage curiously raised its head and turned towards the source of the disturbance.

Glancing between the metal paws, Sam caught sight of a pair of khaki sheathed legs standing just inside the door (since when do cops where khaki?) and felt himself sag with relief. The cavalry had arrived on the scene. He wouldn't be turned into a shish-kebob after all.

As Ravage pulled away from him to face the shouting cop, Sam peeled himself from the floor and scrambled back as fast as he could, wheezing raggedly, feeling like one gigantic bruise and hoping that he hadn't cracked any ribs. Reaching over, he knocked the boxes of instant noodles from the shelf next to his head with a fumbled hand, then used the makeshift crutch to pull himself back to his feet. Wobbling slightly, trying to get his breath back and keep from falling at the same time (it was amazingly hard to multitask when his entire body throbbed in time with his galloping heart) he looked towards the door, expecting to see half a dozen police cars parked outside in the rain and at least a dozen cops swarming into the store with bazookas and air support. Instead, he saw a bicycle with a plastic-wrapped seat fallen on its side just outside the door, and a single cop would couldn't have been much older than he was, wielding only a night stick and a hand gun.

The cop continued shouting as Ravage lazily stalked closer, stupidly unaware that he was making himself an even bigger target by yelling out orders to cease and desist. Sam tried to call out to him, to warn him, but couldn't seem to get enough air into his lungs to speak. But then, in the space of a heartbeat, it was all over- Ravage lunged forward like a striking snake, jaws catching the man around the throat even as he emptied his gun into the robot's chest, yanking him forward and slinging him from side to side like a rag doll. There was a loud, sickening crack, and his struggles abruptly ceased, body going limp like a puppet whose strings have been sliced cleanly through. Ravage gave the corpse another vicious sling just for good measure, then flung it to the ground.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. Nope, the cop was still dead, lying silently on the floor with his head at an impossible angle. He had to have been only 26 or so, at the most. He had probably just started making the rounds as a full time cop, maybe even had a wife and baby waiting for him at home. He had slogged through the monsoon on a bicycle and bravely faced down a Decepticon, only to be swiftly and brutally done away with, all because _Sam _had called for help to save his own skin.

He clamped a hand to his mouth to keep himself from puking, backing towards the rear of the store as Ravage idly nudged the body with one paw. Then, certain it was dead, it twisted around it face its original prey, stalking towards Sam with something he could have sworn was _hunger _in the way its jaw worked absently, metal fangs grinding together. The way it moved suggested that it was in no hurry, convinced that its prey would now be too frightened to fight back.

Blinding it had obviously not impeded its ability to track him, or its cold intelligence- trying to make a run for it would not get him anywhere but dumped into a shallow grave. And waiting for help to arrive was no longer an option, as said help was currently lying dead on the floor. There was nothing he could do, no way to escape the alien, either by fleeing or by lying low. He was trapped, a mouse in a lion pit, looking up at freedom and knowing it was unreachable.

It was at that moment, watching fanged death slink closer, that Sam knew he would have to kill Ravage.

The thought of the insurmountable task before him- one which he knew Wheeljack would probably say he had only a .01% chance of surviving- should have sent him gibbering in fear. But instead, looking back toward the dead cop lying on the floor where the alien had left him, forever still and silent, something awoke in Sam's chest. Righteous, boiling _anger _filled the hollow space inside him left by fear and horror. How _dare _the robot- and all the other Decepticons- just expect humanity to lay down and die! How _dare _they strike the first blow and not expect to be struck back! How _dare _they rampage around the planet killing and destroying as they saw fit, laughing and crying out, _'run little fleshy, run'_!

Feeling his gaze sharpen into a flinty glare, his backward stumbling morphed into calm, deadly strides, animal instincts guiding his muscles, black fire honing his mind.

"I am not _prey_," he whispered darkly, viciously, "I am a human. I am the dominant species on this planet. I am a _predator_."

The reptilian part of his brain registered the slight shift in the robot's stance, prompting him to hop back and to the side just as the barbed tail shot forward and thunked deeply into the tile where he had been standing a moment before. In the second it took for Ravage to yank the barbed end of his tail from where it had hooked into the concrete, Sam lunged for one of the refrigerators behind the alien and pulled the humming unit away from the wall with all his might. The refrigerator groaned, shuddered, and tipped ponderously forward; Ravage let out a curiously human scream as it was crushed beneath the falling appliance amid a cacophony of breaking glass and bursting cans of soda.

As soon as the alien was smashed into the floor, Sam took off at a dead run across the store, grabbing up a beer bottle as he went. His gun would have been as useless as the cop's against Ravage (he didn't know why he had ever thought differently) so he didn't both to try looking for it again. Instead, he ran towards the fire box hanging on the wall, turned his face away, and smashed the bottle of beer into the glass window.

Frothing golden liquid flowed down his wrist and over his arm as both the bottle and the glass cover shattered. Sam dropped the broken bottle neck to the floor, then reached into the fire box with both hands and lifted the long handled ax from its hooks. It was heavier than he'd thought it would be, resting against his skin with an honest, deadly weight. The sharp, curving blade- pristine from never having been used- gleamed in the light, a weapon of last resort, a means for breaking down doors and splitting open locks, so simple and primitive yet capable of great power.

Behind him the refrigerator groaned, shifting. Sam transferred the ax to his right hand, holding it in a tight, ready grip at his side, and turned back towards Ravage. Snarling, clicking, the Decepticon struggled its way out from beneath the weight pinning it to the floor, furiously knocking soda cans aside with one long sweep of its tail.

Sam coiled his muscles as it turned to him, murder flickering in its eye, and hefted the ax in his hand, dropping down into a fighting stance. Every inch of him hummed with animal strength, lending him the same power that allowed mothers to lift cars from their children, women to overpower their attackers, and prehistoric humans to fight and kill the very creatures that the alien before him attempted to imitate.

"_You want a piece of me?" _He shouted, possessed by righteous fury so hot it _burned_. "_Huh? You want a piece of me?" _Ravage crouched, growling like a chain saw, ready to spring. _"Well bring it __**ON**__!"_

The alien lunged; Sam dodged to the side, narrowly avoiding being hit head-on, and raised the ax high over his head as Ravage brushed past him. The snarling head whipped back around to try to reach him, teeth flashing for his jugular, and Sam brought the ax down with every scrap of strength in his body on its spiked tail.

A terrible, blood-curdling shriek rent the air as the titanium tip bit deeply into the joint between two vertebrae, slicing through delicate wires. Ravage twisted and writhed, trying to get away, but Sam merely planted a foot on the partially severed end of the tail, pinning it to the floor with his weight, and- letting out a wild cry of his own- brought the ax down again, slicing the rest of the way through the mechanical appendage.

Ravage shrieked again, even more awfully than the first time—its cry warbling as if in terrible pain- and jumped away, leaving the still-twitching end of its tail behind. But before Sam had a chance to enjoy his small victory, the alien immediately turned and came for him again- and this time, the big cat wasn't playing games. Ravage rushed him, streaking forward with its dark maw opened wide to _bite_, and Sam barely had time to stumble back a foot or two before it was on him again. He griped the handle of the ax with both hands and brought it up in front of him just in time- powerful metal jaws snapped closed inches from his head, held back only by the thick length of oak rammed sideways between them like a bridle.

Radiating a furious energy, Ravage continued to push into him, jaws snapping again and again around the wooden handle of the ax, coming closer to his face each time. Sam tried to push back, arms straining to hold frothing alien away from him, but found himself no match for Ravage's sheer size and strength. He lost his footing and fell to the floor, leaving him once more partially trapped beneath the alien's bulk. Ravage leaned his weight into the handle, continuing to rapidly bite around the wood, jaws working so quickly the robot could have given a wind-up alligator a run for its money, and to his horror Sam felt his arms giving under the pressure.

Suddenly, the parting words of the Decepticon on the other end of the payphone reverberated through his mind, the meaning behind them resounding like a gong through his entire being.

_"Try the third neck joint"_

Sam looked up at Ravage, eyes searching past the rows of flashing teeth, past the flickering amber optic, hunting along its neck, counting out one, two, three...

_"Try the third neck joint"_

The Decepticon had given him exactly what he needed to kill Ravage.

Feeling a sudden, renewed burst of energy, Sam brought his legs up and planted his feet against the alien's chest. He yanked the ax towards him rather than pushing it away from him, and caught off guard by the sudden change, Ravage was jerked forward by the length of wood hooked behind its teeth. Sam kicked his legs into the underside of the robot with all his might as the snarling head started falling towards him, and with an almighty heave, he flipped the robot up over the top of his body, sending it crashing on its back to the floor. The force of the impact shook the entire store, knocking packages from shelves and rattling the bottles of wine.

Sucking in a deep breath to force the black stars away from his eyes, Sam rolled to his feet and turned to face the feline Decepticon once more, redoubling his grip on the punctured- yet luckily unbroken- ax. Ravage, swaying slightly from disorientation, had to scramble around from a moment before it could get its feet back under it. Sam, seeing his chance, didn't wait for it to get back up and ready itself for another attack.

Rushing forward with a snarling battle cry of his own, he swung the ax into the side of the robot's neck, but the humming blade missed the crack between metallic vertebrae, glancing from one of the armored plates beside it in a shower of sparks. Before he had the chance to bring the ax up again for another swing, Ravage's head darted towards him, mouth open wide- and this time, the was no ax handle in its way.

Sam watched, as if from far away, as the mechanical jaws snapped closed around his left forearm, tearing through the cast like tissue paper and biting deeply into his flesh. Everything slowed to a crawl; Ravage- not content with mere puncture wounds- continued to squeeze his arm between its teeth until a strange, deep crack vibrated up through his elbow and into his shoulder, and his forearm bent in a way he knew it was not supposed to bend. Oddly enough he felt no pain whatsoever, not even as the Decepticon continued to grind its teeth into his flesh, causing a flurry of cracking vibrations to pulse in waves through the left side of his chest.

Some part of Sam registered that his arm was being pulverized, that if he ever got out of there alive the limb would probably have to be amputated, but at the moment the only thought at the forefront of his mind was that Ravage, while busy chewing through his cast, had left his neck exposed and vulnerable.

Pulling back the ax with his free right hand, he brought it swinging around and down, the blade finding the third neck joint and biting into it like a key sliding into a lock. Ravage stumbled, releasing his arm, as thick, black ichor spewed from the wound. Feeling cold and strangely numb, Sam wrenched the ax out of the hole, coiled the muscles in his right arm, and brought it back down again, watching with detachment as the entire ax head sunk out of sight.

Ravage howled, gurgling, struggling to stay standing but obviously unable to direct its limbs, and finally lost its balance and started to fall to the side. Sam, gazing up at Ravage from his own position lying in a crumpled heap on the floor (he didn't remember falling, but the floor felt pretty nice all in all) saw the robot begin to tip towards him, registering somewhere in the back of his mind that he would be crushed if he didn't move. But the world was a comfortable, hazy shade of gray, and he really didn't want to move. Ravage would have to find its own patch of floor.

Suddenly, without warning, something slammed into Ravage from the side, jerking it off its feet and sending him flying through the air away from Sam. The feline crashed into the shelves a dozen feet away, knocking them over and sending candy bars flying everywhere, and lay perfectly still. Sam frowned, wondering if they would throw away all that candy just because it fell on the floor. That didn't exactly seem fair- it wasn't the candy's fault it got dirty.

A dark shadow glided over him, and Sam slowly turned his head to glance up, thoughts of candy forgotten. There was a large hole in the roof- how had that gotten there?- and a large, metal hand, dripping with rainwater and boasting of fingers like tapering claws, slowly descended through the hole, reaching for him. Feeling a niggling flash of recognition at the sight of that hand- one which stirred his survival instincts with whispers of 'danger' and 'run'- Sam narrowed his eyes at the shadowed face he could see through the hole in the roof. It was familiar somehow, but he couldn't quite place it.

At least, not until a flash of lightning illuminated the darkness like a small supernova, chasing away the shroud of concealing shadows.

His eyes widened, mouth dropping open in a silent scream.

_Megatron_.

The hand closed carefully, almost gently, around his prone floor, lifting him into the air as the world rapidly faded away around him.

"Come, human," a voice far above him rumbled, "I have need of you."

...

While his master was busy readying the human for transport, Preceptor scurried towards what remained of the traitor Ravage.

Although he had been loathe to temporarily adopt an alternate form other than his chosen guise as a microscope, he had to admit that the eight delicate appendages sprouting from his body- reminiscent of the insectoid creature the humans had labeled an 'arachnid'- were of great use in picking his way over fallen boxes made from compressed tree fibers and the sulfate-laden consumables wrapped in petrol products. What useless products the fleshlings insisted on making, squandering their short lives in pursuit of them!

Well, no matter. According to the calculations of his secondary processor, it would not be long until the humans were left without a sun, and then squabbling, barely-sentient species would be eradicated. A good thing, too. It was in the best interests of all Cybertronians- Decepticon and Autobot alike- that they nip the creation of race of Quintessons in the bud.

And scanning the damage to Ravage's exoskeletal structure as he carefully picked his way up one of the drone's extended forelegs, he realized that that day could not come a moment too soon. Opening a temporary shunt to capture the overflow from his emotion cores, he turned his primary processor to the task at hand, fearing that a cascade of gibbering sub-routines would overwhelm him if he studied damage a single human had inflicted on one of Megatron's greatest hunters for even half a nano-click more. No, it was much better to do away with the humans altogether than risk more like _this _one showing up to oppose them.  
::What is taking so long?:: Megatron snapped at him over his comlink. Preceptor contracted his head into his shell, drawing his legs towards his body, then was reminded by a whirring subroutine that his master was outside the building and could not, ergo, crush him at the urgings of an errant blip of code.

::Just a click more, master!::

Snapping himself back into position, he scurried the rest of the way along Ravage's deactivated shell, stopping at the drone's head. He lifted up one needle-thin leg, positioned it just so, and drove it down into the tiny access port recessed behind the jaw. A microscopic interface wire extended from the tip of the appendage plugged into the access port, connecting Preceptor to Ravage's core processors. A small burst of code transmitted down the wire took care of the passive emergency firewall, and then he had full access to the drone's systems.

It took longer than he would have thought to find the information he had been sent to look for, but at last he was able to break the encryption around the hidden file, downloading the data within.

Preceptor did not like what he found. Worse, he could readily imagine that _Megatron _would not like what he found, and upsetting his master was unusually detrimental to his health.

::I have the file, master:: he called through the comlink, then sent a packaged data burst containing the information he had discovered.

Yet despite the direst outcomes presented by his situational analysis programs, Megatron only rumbled consideringly.

::This could prove to be...very interesting::

Correction- it was _worse _than his most dire imaginings. It never ended well when Megatron considered something interesting.

As Preceptor picked his way back through the debris and exited the building, folding himself into the waiting alcove beneath his master's wing, he pretended that he had not heard the words Megatron uttered to himself in English while reverting to his alt form, focusing instead on logging into the systems monitoring the condition of the disgusting human larvae resting unconscious somewhere deep within his master's body.

He pretended he had not heard them while his master rocketed into the air, and continued pretending all through the ensuing flight.

After all, it was never, _ever _a good thing to hear Megatron whisper, "I will enjoy seeing your dark side, my brother. I will enjoy it very much."

…..

Unit X watched the conversing Autobots from the shadows, comparing their energy signatures to its internal database and discovering them to be Optimus Prime and Jolt. The blue Autobot was of no consequence, but the last Prime standing beside it was the sole target of Unit X's mission.

Withdrawing slightly into the shadows of the London alleyway, Unit X activated its unique transformation node, feeling the meta-crystaline structure of its exo-skeletal frame began to change its composition, becoming soft, pliant, and pale, an almost perfect replica of human skin. That same meta-crystaline compound—even more prevalent in the frontal area of its head for facial replication—also formed brown eyes and sprouted into brown hair. After the imitation flesh had formed, a thin layer separated itself from the whole around its torso and limbs to imitate the weave and texture of clothing.

At last, Pretender form fully assumed, Unit X strode boldly from the shadows, striking out towards Optimus Prime.

As expected, Prime's head lifted as it approached, energy signature registering shock, and sent out a questioning transmission in English.

"_Sam_?"

Beneath its flesh mask—a perfect replication no other unit in existence could achieve- Unit X felt a sense of contentment.

This was going to be easy.

….

...

0.o

I am so evil, I sometimes hate myself. My characters hate me too, for doing these things to them. Don't worry, there will be a break from the Sam-whumpage in the next chapter.

Additional notes:

1) Life has finally returned to mostly normal for me now that I have found a medicine that completely erases my symptoms. Still don't know what's wrong with me, but I'm content to continue not knowing so long as this medicine works.

2) I wanted to post this chapter by the end of May, but as I started a full-time job as soon as school ended it was difficult to find time to write. I also had to deal with re-writing the Wheeljack scene at least three times to get it right.

3) This is a sci fi story, people. It's going to be a little creepy—deal with it. Everything will still be based in actual scientific fact, so don't worry about unicorns or dragons suddenly coming into the picture.

4) I get lots of people saying how they wanted to hear from X character in the newest chapter, but keep in mind it's just not physically possible for me to say what everyone is doing at every moment. It would also make me a bad writer—some things would be ruined if I revealed them too early.

5) Nobody loves me anymore! I posted a cute, fluffy, Ironhide and Annabelle one-shot to my NEST Files story, and almost no one read it…..I think I'm going to go eat ice cream now….

And now, THE GOOD NEWS. (I know you've all been waiting for it)

First, this story is absolutely, positively guaranteed to be finished by next spring, since it has now become the focus of a sophomore year project for one of the programs I'm enrolled in at college. The project itself is also a social experiment on the artistic value of fanfiction—so send in detailed, thoughtful reviews that I can share with the panel evaluating my work! I need to show them that fanfiction can be a legitimate art form in its own right. REPRESENT!

Next, the really REALLY good news. Drum roll, please!

…

…

Instability will have a sequel! That's right, folks, you heard that correctly! A sequel! I can't tell you much about it yet without spoiling the end of Instability, but I can say that it will be entitled "Kingdom Come" and that about 75 percent of it will take place on Cybertron.

Have fun!


End file.
